Meet Cassandra

How did the course impact your life both personally and professionally?

Professionally, it geared me towards Production and Broadcasting. I really wanted to get into music more heavily but also actually making stuff and publishing my own stuff.

It gave me direction and it was really good in terms of the practical skills that we learnt in terms of CV making, Podcasting which was a massive thing as well.

It kind of gave us permission to say, you know what you don’t have to wait for that job to come around, you can always get started by creating and publishing stuff yourself.

In many ways, it helped me professionally to work towards broadcasting which I am in now. It helped me move towards taking more ownership over my own career.

Confidence wise, it was the first time I had the confidence to start working on my own projects and to also network

Also the network I gained/developed with people on the scene, was one of the best things about the course. It was nice to network with like-minded creatives.

It was nice because we were all on different journeys, some people were older, some people were younger but the course helped to break down the stigma, that by 20 you have to know exactly what you’re doing.


What did you do after the course and what are you doing now?

After the course, I started working at Universal, in their Music Marketing Global field. I was working in the international department.

I then did Fran’s Meet a Mentor course and from there I went in television, I did a Channel 4 Production Trainee Scheme, which led me down a path of TV.

So now, I’m freelancing in TV. I have done stuff like the General Election Debate with ITV.

Ultimately, I would like to go down the Film-making route and directing my own stuff.

What is it like to exist as a black woman in the creative industry?

It’s really hard because I think there is a lot of focus on gaining entry-level positions for people of colour.

But the difficult thing is that I think sometimes when you enter into these spaces, particularly as a black woman, for example, my experience has been that it is quite difficult because then you find yourself in a sea of white, predominantly middle-class people who kind of have a shared culture and language that you’re just trying to assimilate into at first.

So it’s really isolating. A big thing for me is not seeing black people or people who are under-represented in the industry, in senior positions, which makes it harder to see how a certain career progresses.

Half of the industry is not just about how hard you work but instead about nepotism and being recommended, and people liking you for your personality.

It’s hard trying to navigate through the cultural languages when you’re the only one and it takes a toll. Surviving in the industry was very hard for me at first. There’s kind of an internal struggle about whether you assimilate into the culture or whether you try and find a way to bring your own experiences into the role that I’m doing.

It’s really difficult in terms of career progression. People always say they want diversity but you question whether they just want a surface-level diversity or whether they want diversity if thought.

It seems that usually, people don’t want you to really diversify what they’re doing, they just want to have a black person in the room to kind of legitimise what they’re doing.

Trying to navigate an industry that, although it’s amazing, can be quite fake in some ways

You don’t really see people who look like you at the top.