We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jake Mackey . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jake below.
Alright, Jake thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the best boss, mentor, or leader you’ve ever worked with.
The best boss I ever had was early on in my career, which I think is a pretty common thing. His name is Nick McGahan, and he was my boss when I was an undergraduate production assistant for the athletics department at UMass. It started out as just a part-time gig that I took because I liked sports, and someone else had hired me before Nick started. When he took over at the start of my junior year, he quickly realized that I was into the job more than others, taking on every role of the production every game. At the end of my junior year and into my senior year, he made me one of the full-time interns.
The start of my senior year of college I would say is when my anxiety was at its worse, mainly because I did not know how to identify it. Again, common story, but college was about to be over, other people were getting jobs lined up for the end of senior year and I felt like I was way behind and that I was never gonna be able to get a job and make a career for myself. For no reason other than my lack of self-esteem.
This all boiled over one day when I was at my intern job under Nick, editing a social video, and I could not figure out something very minor in Adobe Premiere. So I did what any mature adult would do and basically started crying and talking about how I was never going to be able to get hired by anybody and that the future was bleak. A lot of bosses probably would have just told me to go home. Nick talked me down, and we started going over what I liked doing, and what I have done. By the end of that day, I had put together a reel for myself of my undergrad production work. Seeing the work I had done over the course of four-years, and the improvement over time, as well as the versatility of skills I had, gave me so much confidence going into the job application process, and I am not sure I would have gotten there if Nick did not talk me down that day. On top of that, he was just a great mentor and friend, and really allowed me to take projects on by myself which has given me a lot of confidence and independence in my work to this day.
Jake , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
When I was a kid I certainly was obsessed with sports. Could name every player on every team, opted for ESPN over Nickelodeon most of the time, and was convinced when I was 10 that I would be a professional baseball player. Thankfully I realized early on that I wasn’t born with the athletic genes for that, so I figured the next best thing was to be around sports and be a writer. I started a blog when I was in high school, and I would share on social media, and my parents would share it on theirs, and people really liked it and they kept telling me that. Schoolwork was always really difficult for me, and like I said I was not the best athlete, and prior to starting the blog, I had enrolled at a vocational high school to be a carpenter because I thought hands-on work would be best for me. I quickly realized I wasn’t built for that. So when people read my stuff and told me I was good at it, that was the first time I had been told I had a real talent. So I went all in for a bit.
I went to college for communications and journalism, kept the blog going, joined campus newspapers, and had internships at local newspapers and TV stations. While this was all great work, I realized that being on the news side of things was not for me, because it just didn’t feel like I was serving anyone but the company. There was no connection to the stories, we were just pushing out stories just to push them out, and there was no rooting interest. I realized that I liked the storytelling aspect of things, but I wanted to tell them my way, not in this copy-and-paste news format.
I ended up going to work for the athletics department at Boston College as a media producer. I took those story-telling skills that I learned as a writer and applied the technical production skills that I had learned in college and through internships. That was a great experience as I was creating videos, short-form, and long-form on a daily basis and telling stories about the thing I loved most, which was still sports.
When the pandemic hit, sports obviously stopped, and the business side of sports kicked in. Work stopped for a bit, but I was lucky enough to keep my job. However, it was not nearly the same. Taking videos of games inside of empty stadiums, and dealing with an ever-changing game schedule, all while having the threat of jobs getting cut due to lack of revenue from ticket sales. This was the business side of sports that I hadn’t experienced before, and I did not like it.
This was the first time where I was like, okay where to go from here, I have only ever been focused on working in this one industry, and now I needed to see where my skills translated.
I applied ferociously to every corporate communication, and media producer job there was and had some good conversations. Seeing that people were interested in me even though I was switching industries was another big confidence boost for me. I ended up taking a job as a multimedia producer working for the city that I live in, which is where I am currently working. Getting to tell the stories about the places, and the people that make up those places within my own community is really rewarding.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I am not sure if it is a goal or a mission, but I think it is this constant chip that has been on my shoulder most of my life, that I think I put there myself if I am being honest. As I previously mentioned, school was painful for me as a kid. Nothing came easy in the classroom, I was always last to finish everything and I couldn’t help but compare myself to my peers who seemed to understand everything so easily. On top of that, I had and still have an extremely smart older sister who was always at the top of her class growing up. So as I got older I just felt like that would be my life, constantly be a few steps behind everyone.
The only thing that I was good at, was stuff I had control over. Writing, putting my thoughts on paper or on a screen, or behind a camera. I was always good at that stuff, and people liked it. Of course, how do you make a career out of that? I asked myself that often, and stressed about it, particularly so when older family members or friends, and my own peers would ask me how I would get a job doing creative work after college. I felt like I messed up not picking some extremely linear path to a career because it seemed like everyone had it all figured out but me.
But here I am, 26 years old, with two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree, and a whole lot of creative work and credits to show for it. So I would say so far so good. I try to give myself that pat on the back every now and then because chubby 10-year old Jake with his head buried in his math book out of frustration at the kitchen table I think would be pretty proud of what he’s accomplished.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
Definitely being able to see your finished product, and feel a sense of accomplishment because you own that now. It can be as large as an hour-long documentary where you had to cut interviews for hours and Broll, or it could be one photo I took that was captured in a half a second. Both take time, but I think the coolest thing is that each piece of creative work you put out is probably a little bit better than the last one, because you are always learning and trying to improve
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