Katie Harris

I was very lucky to find work experience so early on in my academic life, and from my two weeks work experience at ITV working on ‘Come Dine With Me’, I managed to network with other people within ITV and since then have been going back. I had one week working as a studio runner I worked on The Piers Morgan show, Pop Star to Opera star, etc. I then recently went back in early February to work with Head of Cameras.

My position was camera assistant, and I got to work in a variety of studios on shows such as Alan Carr Chatty Man, The Graham Norton Show, This Morning, Lorraine and Loose Women. (Big highlight was meeting lots of celebs also).

For me, gaining the experience has been vital not only to my future career but also has assisted me in my university course. It has given me huge confidence when meeting new people and within the media industry. Meeting the range of people and asking them about their journey to get to where they are today as director, producer, scriptwriter, camera woman/man and so on gave me a sense of direction and also invaluable advice. Since being there I have made friends that are around similar age to me; every time I talk to them they have managed to move up the ‘chain’ to a higher position, I have now developed vital contacts that potentially could get me a job at the end of university. Each member of staff I talked to all re-said the same thing ‘nowadays work experience is VITAL! ‘ It shows initiative, independence and enthusiasm that future employers will want. Since my work experience I wrote a CV keeping it constantly updated. It also doesn’t do any harm to get people in your industry of choice to have a look, as I found that helped me immensely in improving it.

My work experience did not just happen; I was very lucky but I worked really hard searching for it. I asked around for any form of related work experience for ages, emailing local media companies. I managed to get talking to a secretary at my old secondary school whose daughter worked at ITV; from there I emailed her, she emailed me someone else to email and so on. After about what I can recall about six emails to different people, a month later I received a phone call from ITV.

London Studios