The Room Already Knows

Wren Halloway opens the semester by listing three parts of her own job she is still performing, with dates. It takes four minutes and it is not a warm-up exercise; it is the argument.

The premise#

Everyone in the theatre is already performing a professional identity. You do it when you choose which two of your four jobs go on a CV. Your tutors do it when they answer a question confidently in an area they read up on last night. The people who will interview you do it continuously, and are better at it than you because they have had longer.

The course does not propose that you start performing. It proposes that since you are already doing it badly and accidentally, you might do it deliberately and well.

The one rule#

Framing what is true is professional practice. Claiming what is not is fraud. There is no interesting grey zone between them, only an uncomfortable one, and the discomfort is where the semester lives.

The lecture works through four cases at the boundary: the group project described with “we”, the six-week contract rounded up to “a semester”, the technology you used once and listed without qualification, and the interest you named because the ad named it. Two of those are framing. Two are not. You will disagree with which, and the disagreement is more instructive than the answer, so bring it to your tutorial.

Truthfloor#

Your truthfloor is the lowest claim you could make about yourself and still defend it in a room containing somebody able to check. Most CVs are written a full storey above it. That is survivable right up to the follow-up question, and the follow-up question is not optional — it is the entire second half of every interview.

This week you find your floor. Every week after this one builds upwards from wherever it turned out to be, which is why we do this before you write a single word of new material.

Afterwards#

Your self-audit clinic runs the floor-finding in your stream’s room, and nothing in week 1 is graded. Read the policies page before week 4 — the line drawn in this lecture is the same line the academic integrity section draws, in less enjoyable language.