Quite a day!

G'day bloggers,

Whew, quite a day. Apart from the fact Sydney's been experiencing a bit of a heatwave this week with no sign of it letting up until storms roll in today sometime, I'm now facing an anxious wait.

After finishing up 17 years in community broadcasting I decided I was gonna make the jump into commercial radio and get a job in production where I've always wanted to be. Unfortunately it's turned out harder than I thought. I've been to AFTRS and did their Production 2 course, which turned up nothing, and after speaking to a few people in the industry, the one thing I'm apparently missing is a certificate, something on paper that says I'm qualified in sound engineering and the like. So in desperation, I went to the information day at my local TAFE college to find out what I have to do to get into the Certificate II in Radio Broadcasting. These guys are also offering a Certificate III at the end of the 6 months for cert 2 which I'll probably end up doing as well.

It was quite a night. First of all during the session I was told the daytime course was now full. 40 places, and they managed to fill all 40. The night one which is the one I'm going to has 15 places...and 20 students applying including myself. To my immediate surprise, I noticed a guy who's the head of Radio down at that college who I first worked with at 2RDJ way back in 1989 and have met up with several times since! Was great to find that he's gonna be my guide through the course! But that wasn't the end of it, there was an older gent there as well taking us through the info session, and my jaw absolutely dropped when I heard the head of Radio say his name - that older gent was Brian Newington, a man I have the greatest respect and admiration for after listening to a lot of his work on the old Top Spots master tapes I rescued and remastered! I finally met the person behind the voice on the tape ID's, just by chance - I had no inkling at all Brian was gonna be one of my lecturers, and I hope and pray he'll be the contact I need to get a job in production at a commercial station. Even if it's just carting to begin with, whatever - I did carting when it meant dubbing audio onto an actual tape cart way back when for years! On lousy machines but that's beside the point.

With 20 people and only 15 places available, that means some are gonna miss out entering this course. I now face an anxious wait for either a phone call or email sometime today telling me that either I'm accepted into the course or I'm not. I don't think I'll be getting much sleep tonight.