Chloe Jacobs – Globe Education Assistant, Learning
From the age of about eight, my plan was set: I was going to leap directly from my A-levels to English Literature at Oxford University. After interviews, however, a polite rejection letter landed on my doormat and I had to rethink my plan.
Shakespeare’s Globe had been a recurring presence in my life before I applied. It was where I saw my first play, a production of Henry VIII. It was so colourful and full of energy that I gushed about it for weeks when I went back to school! I found myself coming back time and time again for summer schools and other work. So, when I began trawling arts websites for a job or volunteering opportunity to fill my gap year, the Globe was one of the first places I thought of. Flicking through the website, I stumbled upon an advertisement for the job that would become the next (weirdest and greatest) year of my life.
I work in the Learning team, one of the strands of Globe Education. We deal with on-site and off-site learning projects with schools and the local community. My particular role is focussed on two elements of Learning. First there is Outreach, which involves sending Globe Education workshops to schools across the UK. The second is Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank, a huge project that sees 20,000 students descend upon the theatre to experience Shakespeare.
Both of these roles are wonderfully varied, so very rarely do two of my days look the same. In Outreach, my work involves a lot of administration and resourcing, which sounds fairly predictable on paper but is anything but in reality. From creating briefs for practitioners to ordering tennis balls, princess crowns and sheep puppets, there are truly very few dull moments!
In Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank this year, my work has been even more diverse. In the lead up to the performances for students in March, I helped to organise Continuing Professional Development sessions for teachers and 100 free workshops for participating students. I also helped in the preparations for performances, taking the minutes for planning meetings, posting tickets and bagging up programmes. Once the performances began, I got to see all of this preparation come to fruition. I spent my afternoons out on bankside in an (exceptionally fetching) high-visibility jacket, ushering excited school children into the Globe. I won’t pretend that this project was not hard work. It required an awful lot of effort and was one of the most challenging parts of my year here, but it was ultimately also one of the most rewarding. For many of the students, this would be their first experience of Shakespeare or the theatre in general. Hearing them gasp as they saw the theatre for the first time, reading the hundreds of positive comments from students and teachers, and watching my team celebrate the close of a successful project at the end of several months of hard work made it more than worth it.
It must be said that one of the best things about working here is undoubtedly the people. It sounds cheesy, but I was honestly amazed by how much this enormous organisation truly feels like a community. Between working collaboratively on projects with my colleagues in Learning, playing often ludicrously competitive games of Bananagrams in the Green Room at lunch, and discussing Kazuo Ishiguro at Globe Book Club, the Globe and all of the people who work here have always been incredibly welcoming. Not only did this make me more confident socially, it has also given me the opportunity to meet a wide range of people from whom I was able to learn and gain opportunities. The Research Department conducted mock university interviews with me, and Globe Education Practitioners recommended plays to read. In a million other ways, doors were opened for me just by being here and willing to talk and learn. I have also been lucky enough to find a group of weird and wonderful friends in my fellow Globe Education Assistants….If they haven’t said the same thing about me in their blogs then I immediately retract this statement!
I reapplied to Oxford this year, filling my personal statement with all of the experiences I’d had at the Globe and applying all of my newfound confidence to my interviews. I am pleased to say that, if all goes to plan, I will be off to study Literature at Oxford, once my wonderful year as a GEA is over.
Interested in becoming a Globe Education Assistant? We want to hear from school leavers who are interested in developing careers in the arts or education. Applications are open until Monday 5 June. Find out more and apply.