Introduce yourself!

I am Michael Thompson, I have currently got 2 pieces of paper from Swinburne, one being a Broadcast Media Diploma, one being a Bachelor of Arts (Journalism), and I am currently deferred doing my Masters of Media and Communications.

 

Tell us about your media background.

It has been tough to sort of juggle between working and doing study at full time at one point. It was very hard to sort of keep my head in the game a little bit with assignments, and trying to study for stuff as well as doing other outside projects as it’s the latter part of my degree when I started to find that work life balance and start to hopefully get them working in tandem together.

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I currently work as a panel operator and producer for CrocMedia and 116 SEN doing their live sports stuff. So I am currently working hard on NRL Nation which is syndicated across NSW and QLD and I had a great opportunity to ground produce the ANZAC night game between The Melbourne Storm and The New Zealand Warriors. I am also doing stuff for AFL Nation, Football Nation, I have done stuff for The Big Bash Nation as well. I have done some stuff Sports Day stuff as well, doing stuff for the NBL and Football Victoria which is the premier soccer competition.

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How has studying Media and Communications as Swinburne in both and undergrad and post grad capacity assisted in you securing work?

Swinburne helped me sort of look at going out there and getting my name out there and getting a lot of experience, a lot of work experience helped a lot.

 

I did a lot of work experience with 116 SEN, I did some stuff at Southern Cross Austereo, some stuff at 3AW as well just to get that experience in radio.

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I did some stuff at the Student Youth Network (SYN Radio) for about 3-4 years as well as being EP of the Sports Desk which helped me sort of control and get into the sporting landscape of things and the media industry which I thoroughly now enjoy.

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Also Swinburne helped me with learning the media inside and out a lot better especially the sort of theoretical stuff with media law and going out and reporting public forums was also another subject I thoroughly enjoyed.

 

Swinburne also gave me the opportunity to travel overseas, so I did 3 weeks in Jordan and the UAE writing stories for Swinburne, and for the foreign correspondent website which was a class that Swinburne had for a short time which I thoroughly enjoyed as well. So I got to do that and that was a great experience for myself. So Swinburne has taught me a lot as well. I did some stuff for 3SSR, I was music director and station manager there as well and I got to work with so many like minded people like myself. I got to work with people in creating and collaborating projects, and putting shows together and helping people making sure their shows go to air and helping sort of the young minds growing and teaching them the radio side of things as much as I could.

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Do you have any advice for those who are currently studying who are hoping to build a career in the media?

Definitely work/life balance is the main thing in regards to what you do at Swinburne. You have got to make sure that you got to keep your social life and your uni life as separate as possible and keep your work life separate from your social life, and your uni life as well. Definitely do study, but also have a little bit of fun too.

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Make sure you work as hard as you can, there’s always opportunities to put your foot in the door somewhere so if you can find someone, or if you can get mentored by someone who is working really hard in the media industry, I would recommend that 100 per cent. But yeah just definitely work hard, do as much as you can as possible. Even if you are in your post grad too, and try and start putting your name out there and all of that. Use LinkedIn as well, I use my LinkedIn account quite a bit too, to sort of connect with other like minded people, like myself. So the opportunity’s there, you have just  got to be in the right place at the right time.