I am job.

This week I started my first official post-college-real-life-job. It essentially brings together two things I've wanted to do for years: work in a high school/higher ed environment and work with film/tv/video stuff. The job pays well and I have pretty decent benefits (I think?) but, as with most things, nothing is perfect.

The school district is pretty well-off but, the high school, especially, isn't that great. The school is located in the middle of the woods between two golf courses (Purchase, anyone?) but most of the kids tend to act like they're from the inner city, apparently. There's little to no discipline, or so I'm told, so the kids don't give a shit and that translates throughout the school. There are six schools ranging from K-12; the lower schools are really good, from what I understand, but it kind of falls apart by middle school (7th grade).

My job, specifically, is the Television Assistant. I have a direct boss who has been doing the whole thing by herself for five years now. By "the whole thing" I mean shooting district-wide events, editing them, compressing them for TV, compressing them for the web, creating DVDs, distributing DVDs and heading an after-school program for middle school students two days a week. The things we're shooting are school board meetings, school concerts, graduations, and other special events. My boss has been inundated with footage recently so we're already backlogged and will be even moreso come two weeks from now when we have 5 graduations to shoot.

Right now the editing is fairly straightforward and I'm adjusting to shooting two and half hour long concerts of kids who only sing half the words to any given song they're performing and play more sour notes than true. I guess Purchase spoiled me in terms of decent performaces as it's what I've come to expect, but then I have to stop and remember that some of these kids are in middle school. Both my boss and I are adjusting to each other, as would be expected--I hope it contiunes to go smoothly.

I'd really like to get some things off the ground once the new TV station is built in the high school but I already get the sense that there's a lot of red tape and not a lot of student interest in the whole setup. Hopefully I can help change that, if even just slightly.