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Wilma McMaster

WILMA MCMASTER

00:02 My name is Wilma McMaster. I’m the senior marketing adviser of the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise.

00:09 Well basically I am responsible of marketing an educational establishment, so I help them recruit students. So my job involves producing a prospectus, to tell prospective students about us, putting out, organising adverts to put in the paper, organising promotional materials and making sure that everything we do fits into the college’s ethos and brand.

00:32 I started off by doing a degree in agriculture because I grew up on a farm and I decided that’s what, I liked agriculture, so I did a degree and then I, when I finished that degree, after travelling the world a bit and milking cows, which was good fun, I came back to Northern Ireland and I got a job with the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, here, in one of their colleges and I started off lecturing in pig production but because I had a personal interest in marketing, as I got older, I suddenly realised I would like that aspect of life really. I, uh I took the professional marketing qualification, which was a challenge as it was a marketing one, in my spare time, while I was still working as a pig lecturer and once I’d finished that, I was looking around for a marketing post and my employers got to hear that I had this qualification and they moved me into a succession of marketing jobs.

01:25 It was one of those things that at seventeen, eighteen, I was at school, not quite sure what I was going to do, but I did I did want to go on to college. My mother was a teacher and I think it was the expectation that I would go on to college and I was quite happy with that because I didn’t really want to work, when I was eighteen, so that was probably the, there was this general expectation but I had no problem in, in going along with that.

01:48 Once I started doing A levels and I was treated more like an adult and I was doing three subjects that I really liked, then I really enjoyed it and I did much better in my A levels than I did at my GCSEs.

01:59 I, I was in interested in travelling and I was interested in agriculture and I, I considered veterinary nurse, a veterinary, being a vet as well but I decided on, on agriculture, um but it was partly because, really because of my farming background, it was what I knew. I didn’t think of what career I was going to have after that, I had no idea, I just was thinking, what’s the next step gonna be, go to college, what degree am I gonna do and I decided on agriculture.

02:23 When I finished my degree in agriculture, I wanted to travel and see the world and I recognised that one thing I could do was work on farms and I actually contacted uh farms in New Zealand um to do, to, to get a job milking cows, so I could travel to New Zealand and Australia and I did that for a year. It was actually through my own personal experience of milking cows at home and on my cousin’s farm that I was able to go and do that because the degree in agriculture didn’t actually teach people to milk cows, that was just because I knew how to do that. Um but the farmers found it very useful, I was able to do all those things as well that I’d learned in my degree.

02:59 Um a large part of what I do now is actually based on experience that I have gathered over a long number of years. A little bit comes from my agricultural background.

03:09 Probably when I decided that agriculture was fine but it wasn’t that riveting and I decided I was going, when I, once I was a bit older, I decided I actually quite like marketing and I am prepared to put the time into doing that qualification at night over three years and since that, that then enabled me to move into a marketing-related job.

03:30 You can change career later on, when you find out, oh I’d rather do that instead. It’s becoming much more common now to do that and also, if you want to do something that you need very high level qualifications for, just because you, you can’t get straight on to that ;ladder doesn’t mean to say you’ll never get there. There is more than one way to get to a career nowadays.

03:50 END