1. "Best life chances" - Helen McHugh on being a Bedfordshire IAG advisor

In this interview we get to learn what a Bedfordshire IAG advisor does. I speak with Helen McHugh, an experienced IAG advisor.
During the interview, Helen mentions the Children in Need project and Study Programme. The Children in Need project is a 9 session course called “Like It, Live It”. It is funded by Children in Need but is run by Develop. The course helps young people develop their confidence, team working skills and mental wellbeing. Study Programme is a full-time education programme run by Develop where young learners can study towards maths and English qualifications as well as qualifications such as Childcare, ITQ, Introduction to Beauty and Employability.

Develop EBP is a company which provides learning courses for a range of ages, but predominately ages 16 - 19. Develop currently has training centres in Bedford, Dunstable, Hitchin and Norwich.

(Probably should have covered this in the interview)

Techie stuff: This interview was recorded using just a Zoom H4N handy recorder. No external microphones were used; only the Zoom’s internal mic was used. The Zoom was rested on a little chunk of foam beside myself and Helen. We were both sitting around 50cm from the Zoom’s mic. No headphones were used by either myself or Helen to listen to ourselves as we recorded.

The advice I read about podcasting says that you should ideally have a microphone for each person involved in the interview, and experts suggest that it is good to use a dynamic cardioid microphone as this will just pick up what a person says and minimise background (ambient) noise.
How distracting was the traffic noise for you?

The interview took place in a small room beside a busy road. The windows were not double glazed and you hear spells of background noise from the road outside.

Despite the problems, as an amateur I was actually quite pleased with the recording, in that afterwards, I could basically hear what was being said and that I had pressed the right buttons on the Zoom during the interview. I also liked just how quick it was to set up the Zoom and do nothing fancy. The introduction to the episode was recorded using a Blue Yeti USB microphone on its cardioid pattern. This section seemed to sound OKish before uploading but when I listen to it on the website I feel that it sounds a little different and not as clear, for some reason.

From the interview-skills side of this piece I noticed that my questions were long and quite rambling. In post-production I cut out lots of sections and you may well notice some of the ham-fisted bits. I also actually had to cut out about a whole minute at the start when I went on a nerve-ridden ramble about getting Helen’s surname (McHugh) mixed up with the surname of Bruce Willis’ character (McClane) in the Die Hard films. Classy stuff.

I edited the project in Audacity (free audio editing software) – moving some clips and music around, cutting out a few long pauses, adding fade-ins and fade-outs and finally exported the project as a wav file. I then put this wav file through a piece of free software called The Levelator which is recommended by some experts as a way to adjust the audio levels in the podcast. Finally, I converted this updated wav file to be an mp3 file so that it was ready to be uploaded and published. Without the Levelator the interview section of recording sounds very quiet. The downside to using the Levelator is that the traffic noise now sounds louder.
The lesson here is to never use this room again with the Zoom recorder and also to experiment with individual cardioid dynamic microphones.
Well... it's a start. The experiment continues..... Thank you for your patience.

Background music - Love Chances by Makaih Beats from the Free Music Archive. This music is licenced under Attribution-Non Commercial Licence.