My name is Aidan, my degree was Geography BSc with Professional Placement, and I graduated in July 2025.

I grew up in the Peak District, and Manchester was a city I had been a few times before, and I knew I liked it and wanted to get to know it better. I considered studying in London, but figured I would have a similar ‘big city’ experience in Manchester for a fraction of the cost, and be closer to home! There are so many students in Manchester and so many events and activities catered to students that it’s impossible to be bored – and it’s all so accessible, as the transport network is so good and the University is so close to the city centre. I also really liked the course and the Geography department at Manchester – I joined one of the (virtual) Open Day events (it was during COVID!) and thought it was incredibly well-organised and friendly, the field trips sounded fun, the option to study abroad or do a placement for a year is something not many universities offered, and the flexibility of the course to suit your interests appealed to me.

 

I work for a company called Picture Zero, which is a small consultancy specialising in helping the Film & TV industry be more sustainable. My role involves supervising productions on the ground, supporting sustainability initiatives on set that have been arranged in pre-production, ensuring they are implemented. that the cast and crew are engaged with them, and that we extract as much data and as many learnings to take forward to future productions. 

 

I wrote my final year dissertation about sustainability in the Film & TV industry, as I focused on sustainability during my degree, but outside of the course I had an interest in Film & TV, so did a lot of freelance work and was involved heavily in the student TV station (Fuse TV) and Filmmaking Society at UoM. My dissertation involved interviewing many industry professionals about their experience with sustainability on set, and through those conversations and keeping in touch with people I interviewed, I managed to land the position with Picture Zero. 

 

I would not be where I am now without having had the opportunity to do a placement year in industry as part of my degree – that experience was invaluable and heavily informed my work now, and my dissertation in final year, and gave me crucial time to build out my network and discuss with experts where the knowledge gaps are and how my research could be most valuable.

 

The opportunities offered at Manchester in terms of the range of societies that students can get involved with is also huge – the experience I got running the Student TV Station and Filmmaking Society, being involved with the TEDx society (helping to organise the 2022 event, and ending up giving a talk at the 2025 event, in a rather full circle moment!), and various other societies I was involved with, were so effective in meeting like-minded people and willing collaborators on silly projects, and getting experience with equipment I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to, you never really get the chance to do any of that (at least for free!) once you graduate. 

I remember cycling absolutely everywhere on my beaten-up bike – the city is so easily accessible by bike, and I lived in Victoria Park/ Longsight for the entire duration of my degree, which is 5 mins to campus or 10-15 mins to the city centre – it enabled me to squeeze in so many activities around my degree that I never would have been able to otherwise. 

 

I also have fond memories of exploring the city on foot, primarily with the Run Wild Society, which is a brilliant community of social runners at the University who are all so lovely – their weekly runs became a regular part of my routine (rain or shine), and we even did trips abroad together! 

For the last 50 years or so, the Geography department has taken all of the incoming freshers on a Field Course in Keswick in the Lake District.  (https://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:h23-hypyb9ht-7p5z0t/keswick-field-trip) It always takes place the weekend before freshers week, with the idea being that you get to meet your fellow coursemates and make some friends that you can then go to the freshers events with – rather than it being a more initially daunting solo experience; you get to meet the staff who will be teaching you for the coming years, and you get a taste of what doing fieldwork looks like at a university level before you have to do it for real and be assessed on it. It’s a huge asset to the course – I made friends during that course that I later ended up living with in second and final year!  

The great thing about doing a Geography degree is that you literally study how the world works, so it really opens your eyes to having a greater understanding of the reasons behind many of the topics in the news, why the weather is becoming more extreme, what the different plant and animal species we are surrounded by in our daily lives and how they adapt to living in cities and amongst humans, etc etc. I use many of the skills I learned in my degree and many of the case studies I researched in my day to day life – particularly working in sustainability, on the ground with people who do not have a background in sustainability but are curious about climate change and what they can do about it, I feel like my time at Manchester has better informed me to confidently have discussions with people about these topics and point them in the direction of other useful resources if they want to look into these topics in more detail.

 

In May, I wrapped working on my first major ‘tentpole’ feature film as a Sustainability Specialist, having seen it through from early prep through to wrap – an 8 month process for a film of this size! We were able to have a significant impact in reducing emissions across the film, and through material and food donations and legacy project funding, we were able to have a tangible impact in people’s lives too, which was very satisfying, and a huge achievement! 

To continue to use my (admittedly niche) skillset in the intersection of sustainability and Film & TV to help decarbonise the industry as much as possible – there’s a huge amount of work still to do, but it’s achievable, it has a huge impact, and there’s appetite and support for it to happen, so it doesn’t feel like an impossible task. 

100% get involved with societies from Day 1 – there’s over 400 of them at UoM, so there’s definitely going to be at least one that piques your interest. The degree is really just an excuse to get together with other students and do some extra-curricular stuff, in my eyes anyway. To help facilitate this, I chose catered halls in first year, and that worked out really well for me – I knew I’d be self catering anyway starting in second year, so I figured I’d make the most of the chance to have my meals taken care of in first year, which saved me so much time cooking and cleaning and enabled me to meet more people and get involved with more societies.