Semester 1 2027 · Level 3 · No field prerequisite
Professional Identity Performance
Twelve weeks of held nerve.
“I am a safe, competent hire.”
ClaimEverybody you will ever interview with is performing a role they grew into. This course has you do it deliberately, name each move while you are making it, and hold one line for twelve weeks: framing what is true is professional practice; claiming what is not is fraud. Every technique taught here lives on one side of that line.
- Structure
- Twelve teaching weeks, one shared lecture and one stream tutorial each, with a break between weeks 6 and 7.
- Streams
- Three. Chosen in week 1 by how your target roles screen you, not your degree.
- Assessment
- 4 pieces, weighted 20 + 25 + 10 + 45 = 100%. Full briefs on the assessment page.
- Convenor
- Dr Wren Halloway, with three stream convenors and a practice fellow.
Three streams, one lecture theatre
Choose by how the field screens you
Stream 01 of 03
Technical Practice
For the fields where the performance is competence, and someone will eventually ask you to open a terminal in front of them.
Week 1 focus: Audit a CV plus one repo; every claim must point at something that runs.
Convened by Dr Anselm Pike.
Stream 02 of 03
Creative and Communications Practice
For the fields where the performance is taste, and the portfolio is both the evidence and the alibi.
Week 1 focus: Audit a portfolio; mark which pieces are finished and which are in progress.
Convened by Nadia Ferrante.
Stream 03 of 03
Commercial and Public Practice
For the fields where the performance is judgement, and nobody will ever ask to see the spreadsheet.
Week 1 focus: Audit a LinkedIn and a cover letter; mark which claims survive a single show me.
Convened by Dr Sunil Raman.
The twelve weeks
Where the semester goes
Assessment ladder
4 pieces, 100% total
Glossary, in progress
The vocabulary builds week by week
truthfloor
The lowest claim you could make about yourself and still defend it in a room containing someone able to check. Most CVs are written a full storey above their author's truthfloor, which is survivable right up until the follow-up question.
reqspeak
The dialect job advertisements are written in. Every ad is four documents stapled together: legal boilerplate, a wishlist nobody expects met, the work you would actually do, and an accidental confession about the last person who held the job.
gapshape
Not how large the distance between you and the role is, but what shape it has — which parts close in a fortnight, which take a year, and which you will simply have to say out loud. The specific version is the one you can plan against.
The fine print, which is load-bearing. This course teaches framing, not fabrication, and the difference decides what you may put in an outreach message, what a Varnish Note has to admit, and who may be asked to sit on the other side of a practice interview. Where that line falls, who has consented to what, and what happens when somebody crosses it are all set out on the policies page.