How to become a media researcher: Mona's story

Mona Ansari-Beni - Researcher

My job is to research different things for a project. So at the moment. I'm working on a music campaign and we're trying to make teaching resources

for primary school teachers. And for that we need talent to promote the resources. So I’ll look into different talent, think about the target audience - so that’s teachers and that’s children – so what kind of Talent would they be interested in? And also I’ll help up with shoots, for example, if we’re going to record this Talent, they’ll need equipment, they’ll need locations… so I’ll look into that. At GCSE I was pretty much an all-rounder, did OK at everything. Then at A-levels I kind of did a mix, so I did two sciences, and English Lit and History.

I was OK at all of them again, and then got to this stage where you’ve got to choose what you want to do and I always just had no idea what I wanted to do. And then I remember the thing that made me realise that I wanted to do media is, I got my iphone and I just starting using imovie and made these like stupid little music videos, but I really enjoy doing it. The whole filming it, just doing silly little shots, I was doing stop motion but just moving them slightly myself. It was just really fun, I thought, you know what, I could actually do this for a job.

Special skills that I need to do my job is definitely good communication. Whilst I’ve worked at the BBC I've worked at different teams, different sizes of teams, different people and you always need to really adapt yourself to work within the team and communication is so important. I always ask them what they want, how they want it. What best way of formatting they want, because at the end of the day you’re trying to help each other, so it's always really good to speak to each other.

I think my advice would be for anyone who wants to come and work in media is to just ask. You don't really get if you don't ask and I found my way through asking people to do some work experience, or to do shadowing and even when I'm still working here, I want to experience different parts of the BBC, so I’ve always asked, could I shadow this person in radio, or could I come here and just see what you do.

And then once you get in this industry, I think my biggest advice would be just to say yes, and really get yourself out of your comfort zone, because that's where all the best things happen. I really like working at the BBC, and I remember the day I was sitting to wait, for my interview and I saw someone go in, and I thought, oh my God, they’re just… that's cool, I think I really want to work here. And when I started I just really found it just such a proud place to work. Everyone is so helpful. Everyone is so friendly, and I really like working for something that I believe in.