Alasdair Lindsay's Alumni Story
UEA graduate Alasdair Lindsay writes about the value of his degree and his job as a digital PR manager.
I’m Alasdair Lindsay—a 2020 graduate from UEA’s BA in Scriptwriting and Performance (now called Drama and Creative Writing), and I'm now working as a Digital PR Manager at Reboot Online Marketing.
I began studying at UEA in September of 2017, largely due to their reputation as an outstanding creative writing university. However, the city of Norwich itself, and UEA’s commitment to its values of respect and collaboration were huge factors in my decision to study there.
The university’s Scriptwriting and Performance course was immediately appealing due to how tailored the programme is to a specific corner of the arts, and its opportunity to spend three years building skills solely in this area. Additionally, the course’s in-house theatre company, Minotaur, offered experience which would become invaluable in my career in ways I would not know when starting the degree.
Outside of the course, my time at UEA prepared me for life beyond university with a more diverse and enriched worldview, and building a desire to learn and research topics outside of an educational setting. Most importantly, it allowed me to spend time with like-minded people and better understand my own attitudes about writing and creativity. In particular, the process of writing up my dissertation—a 60 page screenplay—was one of my most rewarding experiences to date.
After graduating during the early days of the pandemic, I struggled to settle in a full-time job, until being employed at Reboot Online Marketing, an SEO Company. I never would have secured my position in PR without the practical writing skills I had learned from UEA. The experiences I had volunteering as Publicity Officer for a year in UEA’s Minotaur Theatre Company and joining the marketing team for our final third year production both played crucial roles in shaping my skills. After joining Reboot in September of 2021, I became a manager shortly before my two-year anniversary in August of this year.
The most rewarding part of my work is engaging with and researching for a variety of clients, each requiring campaigns to service different sectors and niches. Since joining the company two years ago, I have had the opportunity to research and write about movies, car insurance, mortgages, travel, food, royalty, parenting, football, broadband and culture, to name a few. There is a diversity and flexibility to the workload that, again, I would have felt unprepared for if not for university.
My advice for current students is probably some they have heard before: try absolutely everything you can. Not only will it help pave the way into a new career, but the skills you learn can be applied later in life that you might not have expected before. Besides, there is no opportunity in life to dip your toe into quite as many things.
Alasdair Lindsay studied BA Scriptwriting and Performance (now Drama and Creative Writing) at UEA.