Work project wanderings: Singapore, London, Birmingham, Paris, and Portsmouth
- Andrea
- Oct 3, 2024
- 18 min read
Updated: Apr 27
A little bit of background
In 2015 I was working at the University of Queensland on an institutional graduate employability project. A key contribution to the project was my leadership of the creation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to support students to develop their employability. The course, Unlocking your employability, was the first of its kind on the edX platform, a global consortium of top-tier universities who offer short online courses on a range of subjects. Here's a link to the You Tube course trailer video.
In an effort to flesh out the content and internationalise the course, I had secured funding to source interview footage locally and globally from graduates, employers, and academics in the employability field.
The below graphic sets out the MOOC content and how it links to the employability framework that I developed. We shot a bunch of interviews to address key topics from the seven course modules and stitched them together to present them as montage recordings in each module.
Funding to shoot the international footage extended to two of my colleagues, AR and MP. AR was my partner in the project and MP the videographer from the central teaching and learning unit at the university. This was pre-pandemic 2015 - a world that predated everyday use of video conferencing tools to communicate and connect with others and to record videos footage. I'm writing this post in 2024 and it's incredible to think that things have moved on so much. We wouldn’t be travelling to the other side of the world to film the interviews these days: we’d just record them via Teams or Zoom!
My reflections on what the experience of spending two weeks abroad to film footage for our course meant to me are at the end of this post.
Anyhoo, we set off on a two-week trip in August 2015 for a mad interviewing project in three countries. We spent a few days in Singapore, 10 days in London with day trips to Birmingham and Portsmouth, and went to Paris on the Eurostar for a day's filming.
The trip was a massive logistical exercise that I spent months organising. My tasks included sourcing people to interview, scheduling the interviews to make the most efficient use of our time, finding interview venues, and booking flights, accommodation, room rental, and ground transport. Looking back now, it was no mean feat to pull it all off!
It was also rather cool that were able to capture the perspectives of a diverse group of people, all of whom added depth to our course content. Creating the MOOC remains one of the highlights of my professional life.
Day 1: Journey to Singapore
We flew with Singapore Airlines to Singapore on Saturday 8 August 2015, arriving mid-afternoon. This was my first time outside of Changi Airport, having spent many hours there in between flights to Europe and the UK on previous trips.
We had an easy taxi ride to the Amara, a rather nice hotel that we'd booked for our three-night stay.
It was summer and it super-hot and humid in the city, but we were all keen for a walk and the chance to stretch our legs after we arrived. I had a bee in my bonnet about seeing Raffles, a relic of the country’s colonial past. I think AR&MP went along with my quest just for the pit stop at the famous Long Bar...
I remember we got lost looking for Raffles, but this was a good opportunity to wander around and take in the vibe of the city. We’d come on the weekend of the 50th anniversary celebrations of independence so there was a festive air to the place. My first impressions of Singapore were of an eclectic mix of traditional and modern, with street food and buildings that hinted at the country’s history, intermingled with uber modern structures.
We eventually found Raffles, but I was kind of underwhelmed by it, to be honest. I’m not sure what I was expecting – perhaps I’d watched too many films set in the 1940s and thought I’d see posh people playing croquet and drinking martinis. From the angle we approached, Raffles was didn’t seem as impressive architecturally as I thought it would be nor did it evoke the strong sense of history that I’d imagined.
Not to waste the opportunity, we ventured into the historic Long Bar, where the Singapore Sling, generally accepted as the national drink, was first mixed in 1915. The bar spans two storeys, with a dark, earthy, tropical-inspired décor. We ordered a cocktail each and joined in on the traditional brushing of peanut shells off the bar and onto the floor, an odd custom in a litter-free city.
We eventually walked back to the Amara. The hotel had a nice restaurant (and there were cafes adjacent to the building) so AR and I ate dinner there that evening. This is my rather eclectic meal, although I don't recall eating much of it. This was in the days, too, before I became a vegetarian.
It had been a surreal day! This was my first work trip that wasn't a conference. I felt somewhat responsible for the other two people in my team, given I had organised the whole thing. It was also odd to actually see Singapore after several international jaunts to Europe or the UK where I'd never left the airport on the stopover.
Day 2: Singapore rest day
Our second day in Singapore (Sunday) was ostensibly our rest day and the chance to shoot some B-roll (secondary) footage. We first wandered around Orchard Road, the main shopping street, and jostled with the crowds. Really, Singapore could be any modern city in the world, although there are some pretty streets and lovely buildings that nod to the past.
The main part of the day was taken up with our visit to the Skyway at the Gardens by the Bay. The national garden is a premier tourist attraction in Singapore, where horticultural and garden artistry is on display. We wandered around the gardens but spent most of our visit lining up in the intense heat for the Skyway, a 22-metre-high 128-metre-long aerial walkway suspended between two artificial super trees. The structure itself is kind of funky and the walkway provides superb views of the gardens and of Marina Bay.
That evening, I tagged along with AR to meet friends of hers who were living what I thought at the time was a glamorous expat life in Singapore. We had a burger dinner and then went back to their apartment for a bit. I was fascinated by their life in the city, so completely removed from my own (and a little overwhelming, to be honest).
Day 3: Singapore filming
Day 3 was Monday, 10 August, the national holiday for the 50th anniversary of independence. We hadn’t realised that when we planned the trip, but fortunately our three scheduled interviews still went ahead. We did two in the morning, one with a UQ graduate and recruitment professional in a conference room at our hotel (bottom lefthand photo below) and the other a short taxi ride away to an office building to interview a Marketing graduate (righthand photo). At least it was quiet in the building for the interview during the public holiday!
The third interview (top lefthand photo above) wasn’t scheduled until 4pm. This meant there was a gap in the day. We all went our separate ways for a bit after having lunch at the hotel. I took at taxi to the Changi Museum as it was the only thing I really wanted to see. I only had a couple of hours, but I figured I may as well make the most of the opportunity.
I have read that the museum has had a major upgrade in recent years, but when I went, it was a small, simple museum. Looking at the museum now from its website (photos below), it seems rather fancy. I was moved by what I saw during my 2015 visit, as the simplicity of the museum then seemed in keeping with the history of the experiences of prisoners-of-war in Singapore during WW2.
Day 4: Journey to London
Our whirlwind visit to Singapore was over, but we’d gotten the interview footage we needed, and we were off to London on an early flight on day 4, Tuesday 11 August. Our day was completely taken up with the flight to Heathrow. The long distance didn't seem to bad, as we’d had three days in Singapore to break the journey.
Once we got out of Heathrow, we took a taxi to our hotel – although I stressed about the dent in our budget this extravagance made – as it would have been something of a journey to Vauxhall with our bags and filming equipment. Here we are in the black London cab, excited for our first glimpse of the MI6 building that sits across from our hotel.
The Travelodge in Vauxhall was to be our home for the next week and a bit. It was super basic accommodation but the rooms were very clean. The hotel sits right across from the Tube station, and there’s a supermarket next door. Breakfast was included each day. We usually congregated in the eating area each morning to go over our plans for the day.
AR and I took a walk down towards Waterloo that evening to stretch our legs. After the intense heat in Singapore, London was cool and dreary. Not summer as we know it to be! We found The Rose, a nice neighbourhood pub in Vauxhall, and fortified ourselves with dinner to face the gruelling schedule of the next 10 days. I felt properly grown up sitting in the pub with other after-work diners, as if I was working in London myself. I suppose I was, if only for a week and a bit!
Day 5: Interviews in London
Our first interview in London was not until 1pm on day 5 so it was nice to have some time in the morning to acclimatise and wander around central London. AR and I strolled around St James’s Park, my favourite park in London. We were lucky enough to see a horse guards’ parade. London on a nice day sure is pretty!
We did some shopping at Sports Direct (my go-to place for shoes and clothes!) and had a poke around M&Ms World before having lunch at a Costa near the 1pm interview location. This was my fifth visit to London, and I felt quite comfortable getting myself around.
The interviews at 1pm were at PR firm, Firefly Communications in a swanky office near Oxford Street. We interviewed a graduate working at Firefly and the CEO, the latter for the employer perspective on employability. The office was busy, but we were able to set up in a conference room and fit the filming into the interviewees’ schedules.
We had another interview booked for 5pm with a graduate who was working in HR at Harrods. Cool, hey? We filled in a bit of time after the Firefly interviews poking around Harrods. I had been to Harrods a few times before, however the opulence of the goods and chattels is a bit lost on me. I love the vibrance of the food hall, though, and the Harrods merchandise shop, but other than that, it’s more about the historical and cultural significance of the store.
We met our interviewee who firstly gave us a tour of the store and the corporate offices (lefthand shot below). I didn’t realise that the corporate offices were behind the store, connected by a tunnel that is also used for deliveries and stock storage. I understand the tunnel was built in 2000 at a cost of around $50 million. I don’t have any photos of the tunnel or the corporate space where we did the interview, but I think the righthand shot below is what I remember of the glassed stairwells. That was where we said hello to an off-duty police officer who was part of the security detail for Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, the entrance to the embassy viewable from the Harrods building.
Day 6: Interviews in Birmingham
I remember being quite tired on day 6 as we’d arrived back at the hotel late after the Harrods interview and had been on the go all day. It sounds glamorous to spend time in London working on shooting interview footage, but it was actually rather exhausting! It was Thursday, and we'd been away since Saturday but it felt much longer than that.
AR and I were happy to walk everywhere, but MP had to carry the video equipment so him, probably not so much. I liked walking more this visit to London, as I found that my understanding of the city's geography and my sense of perspective greatly improved. Sometimes it's quicker to walk than navigate the Tube, too.
Day 6 was going to be another long day, starting with an early 2-hour train journey to Birmingham. For reasons I can’t recall, we missed the service we'd booked even though we arrived at Euston station in plenty of time. I think it had something to do with failing to see the announcement for the platform. I know it wasn’t my money we were spending, but I felt terrible about having to buy a second set of tickets.
It was a cold, bleak day in Birmingham when we arrived. I don’t remember much about the city as we went straight to the Birmingham City campus which was a 15-minute walk away from the train station.
A guide published by the UK Higher Education Academy on embedding employability was a key reference resource in the field at the time of developing our institutional employability strategy. I'd reached out to the authors of the guide and managed to secure an interview with one of them. We scheduled the recording for Birmingham City University after they kindly offered to travel from their home university to meet us. The interview stands out for me above all others we conducted on our trip as it was the most difficult to manage. It showed me that knowledge of a topic, and being published on that topic, does not necessarily equate to an ability to speak to the topic in a recorded interview situation.
We also did an interview with a Business School academic, and he took us on a nice tour of the campus. The parts of the campus that we saw were clean and modern and the university seemed like a cool place to attend.
Later, MP caught an earlier train back to London and AR and I wandered around the Arcadian shopping centre near the station before we headed back. We got off the train at Waterloo and walked the half-hour trek back to the hotel in Vauxhall. It was nice to finally head back to the hotel and regroup for the next day’s filming. We were a bit shattered after the interviews. It had been a jarring day.
Day 7: Paris interviews
It was surreal to experience travelling from one country to another for one day for work, living as we do in Australia with its vast distances between major cities. We did it, though! We took the earliest train from St Pancras to Paris on day 7, mingling with holidaymakers as we went through passport control and boarded the train. This was my second jaunt on the Eurostar, the first in 2011 when I travelled from London to Brussels. I know it’s just a train ride – and only a couple of hours at that – but it’s still quite incredible to think that I’ve travelled in a massive tunnel across the English Channel twice now!
We arrived at Gare du Nord. We had plenty of time before our first interview, so we decided to walk the 30 minutes to Boulevard Haussmann where we had booked a room for the interviews in a posh business centre. The business centre was located on a pretty street opposite Galeries Lafayette, close to the Paris Opera House. It was a beautiful morning, and we enjoyed our wander through the Paris streets.
The main reason for our trip to Paris was to interview a study abroad student. We'd planned the interview to capture authentic content on the value of the experience for employability development from a student who was in the throes of the program. I’d managed to locate a student (the girl in blue in the below photos) who was completing her study abroad experience in Lyon. We were able to align our schedules as she was going to be making her way back to the city via Paris after her holidays at the same time as we were in the UK. I'd organised the day in Paris to suit her plans. I remember that I’d had a few emails with her to arrange everything but hadn’t heard from her since she started her summer holiday. We just turned up at the business centre and hoped she would, too. And she did!
The student interview was fabulous and well worth the logistical exercise to organise it. We’d brought some UQ merchandise with us to give as gifts to interview participants and I really appreciated the reminders of home.
We did a second useful interview that day, with CS, a very impressive trilingual (English, German, and French) Mechanical and Space Engineering graduate working at the time for Cyient, a multinational technology company. CS is still in Paris and now has a PhD in strategy and business policy and a new role in this field for a Paris-based strategy consultancy. CS helped us navigate our lunch orders at the nearby EXKi organic, sustainable self-serve café (see below). She stayed with us while we filmed B-roll footage and a video of our student on the streets of Paris.
I had booked the latest train back to London, so we had some time in the afternoon after our student left to catch her train to Lyon. This was my second time in Paris, although the first had been some 19 years ago. CS, our graduate based in Paris, was our host for the afternoon, and I marvelled at how she navigated the metro with ease. We squeezed in a few iconic sights including the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees. Even the second time around I was still in awe of Paris and of us being there for a day for work. It sounds very glamorous!
Our afternoon with CS ended with something I would never do myself: an afternoon tea in a posh hotel. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I do remember it was gorgeous and I felt like an imposter sitting in such a nice place.
The hot chocolate was the best I’d tasted at that point. It was super rich and chocolatey and the treats that came with it filled me up until I ate breakfast the next morning.
We took the Eurostar back to London around 10pm so it was a very long day. We were all exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel. The next two days were the weekend, where we went our separate ways and enjoyed some much-needed personal time.
Days 8 and 9 are missing from this post as they are documented in another post on our cheeky free weekend to explore London. We needed the downtime, and it was nice to have a break from one another given our work project was so intense.
Day 10: Back to work with filming in Portsmouth
Monday of our second week away saw us back on the train, this time travelling down to Portsmouth for more interviews. I’d connected with an academic in the Portsmouth Business School, who had published a paper on graduate attributes. I’d organised to interview her and two other academics in the Business School to make our trip worthwhile. The journey down to Portsmouth was lovely, watching the pretty countryside from the train window, despite the cloudy day.
We had a lovely welcome at the university when we arrived mid-morning. I remember our host coming down the stairs in the main building of the Business School exclaiming that she’d picked up we were in the building by our Australian accents. Ha! She was a gracious host, putting on a morning tea for us, taking us to a student café for lunch (Le Café Parisien below), and giving us some time to connect with the team in Purple Door (also below), the university careers centre.
There was a little time left in the afternoon, so we wandered down to Portsmouth Harbour and did a bit of shopping at a mall near the harbour. MP went back to London on his own then, and AR and I had dinner at the Isambard Kingdom Brunel pub before we headed back to London on the train. The pub is part of the Wetherspoon chain and I recall thinking that it had the most extensive menu I have ever seen.
Day 11: Final London interviews
Garfield House in Marble Arch was the venue for our final day of interview filming. We’d booked one of the meeting rooms at the venue. This gave us access to the buffet-style lunch options in the main eating area that you can see in the below photos.
Our final day was busy as we had two academic interviews and two with graduates working in London. It was rather a thrill for me to do the academic interviews as they were with notable researchers in the employability field whom I had cited in my professional work. I felt a little like a groupie in their presence, but I also felt quite chuffed that I could hold my own in terms of subject matter knowledge. The graduates were great guys and a total hoot. They were keen to chat to us about Brisbane and UQ happenings and we had a blast quizzing them about working in London. The woman on reception at Garfield House had an Australian accent and when we spoke to her, we realised she was from Brisbane (a graduate of the other main university in our city). Small world!
After filming was done AR and I wandered along Oxford Street and did a bit of shopping before having a yummy pizza dinner. That was it for the filming! We were quite glad it was done as it had been an exhausting exercise. What surprised me was the mix of footage quality. Some of the interviews I'd expected to go well had not done so, and vice versa. We hadn't vetted our subjects; we just ran with whomever we could schedule in. That said, the interviews were authentic and unscripted and there was value in that approach, noting that I'd sent the questions and interview prompts prior to filming. It was a mammoth but interesting task to edit the interviews when we got home and determine which bits we’d use for our course.
Day 12: Reconnecting with the Anglia Ruskin team
MP, our videographer, returned to Brisbane in the evening of day 11 so it was just AR and me left for the final two days of our trip. On Wednesday we took multiple trains to Chelmsford to reconnect with the Anglia Ruskin team whose work we had used as the foundations for our own employability strategy. It was a nice easy trip to Chelmsford with a train change at Stratford (London) and an equally easy walk from the station in Chelmsford to the campus. The visit was more relaxing, too, without the need for filming. Our hosts had lunch catered for us, and we had some useful meetings to inform our work.
On the way back to London we had a poke around the massive shopping centre at Stratford and took a much-needed break. Here’s our afternoon tea! I'd been too anxious to eat much at the university meetings, so I was feeling quite hungry by the time we made it to Stratford.
Day 13: Our final day in London
I’d teed up a meeting with two representatives of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) on the morning of our last day. We’d read one of the many research reports that the non-departmental public body had written on employer skills surveys and were keen to speak with the Commission. Founded in 2008 and closed in 2017, UKCES was housed in Great Smith Street SW1, in Westminster. I understand the Department of Education now has offices there.
The most striking things about our visit that I recall were the security measures, the greenery in the interior of the building and the view of Westminster Abbey from the meeting room we sat in. The Commission's work was a little out of our space - more focussed on employability skills themselves than how to develop them - but it was still an interesting meeting that cemented the direction I was taking my university in at the time.
We’d checked out of the hotel in the morning and left our luggage at the hold service at Paddington station. We had a bit of time for final London wanderings before our evening flight after our UKCES meeting. We’d both just about run out of steam by then but mustered up our last reserves to soak up the vibe one last time.
We went to the British Library before we headed to Heathrow, as only true nerds would do. The library houses 170-200 million items - books, manuscripts, music scores, philatelic and cartographic items – and is one of the largest libraries in the world. The building is Grade 1 listed. It faces Euston Road on a large piazza that includes a giant sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi of William Blake’s study of Isaac Newton, as shown below.
As lover of books, it was an incredible experience to visit the Library. We spent some time in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery that has many historic manuscripts on display, including Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Jane Eyre, and texts by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf. There’s also a room devoted to the Magna Carta as well as several copies of the Qur’an.
My work project experience
I'm posting this here, just because it reminds me of my time in London, hanging out with AR and grabbing lunch on the go as we tried to manage the busy schedule. AR and I slotted in so well together, supporting each other through the gruelling interview schedule. We always worked well as a team and we're still friends as I write this post in 2024.
It might be hard to understand now just what went into the organisation of the trip (and the integration of the interview footage into the course when we got home). This was before we had video conferencing technology so we filmed all the interviews with a camera and edited massive amounts of footage later. While I was able to organise the travel and interview schedule online, we still relied on people we had never met before to show up at the organised places and times. That it all went off largely without a hitch was pretty amazing, actually!
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