Freelancing
I think everyone of my generation had to freelance at some point of their lifes. It wasn’t different to me and here I’m going to highlight three freelances jobs that make a huge difference in my life repertory and on my carrer as a whole.
Motriz
It was 2018 and a friend said that she had been contacted by another friend to do a market research for a business that was going to open, but she didn’t have time so indicated me.
The thing is that it wasn’t just a market research job, but an actually job as researcher.
Those two women were about to open a Marketing Agency and needed someone to do the diagnosis phase of the projects, which on their vocabulary meant Market Research.
I only stayed in the job for three months because I were still with two masters going on, but in that time I had the opportunity to do my first market research outside the university.
It was about a cosmetic brand and I got about one hundred answers in two weeks. With those I composed what I now know it’s called a Customer Journey Map and the Market Personas to the brand. Also, I realized the market fit, indicated the best price range and with which products they should start.
After that research there were another, to a barbecue brand and I also created the personas to Motriz itself. It was a great great experience that I will never forget.
Daju
The same friend of the previous job one day asked me to help her in another one, now proposed by a huge B&B brand of our city. They were trying to understand its buyer personas and to make the brand more man friendly, as B&B market is currently related to woman.
I did some real life observation at three different stores of the same brand and talked with almost fifteen different people about their tastes and behavior in this kind of store. After that I transcribed all these conversations and card sorted them by groups of interest, creating some patterns of those behavior, which I used to compose a report that my friend, who had proposed the job for me, really enjoyed.
PUC PR
The Daju job was made by me and three other anthropologists. One of them contacted me few months later to help with another job. This one was a part of a dissertation of a PhD candidate of the Administration Program of PUC-PR. The goal was to understand the university experience of the grad students of PUC-PR and to do so it was necessary to immerse on their lifestyle.
I was responsible for two different graduation courses: Law School and Civil Engineering. I’ve done field research by watching all their classes for two weeks, taking notes of their behavior during classes, between them, during tests and even at their lunch breaks.
I also interviewed some of them, but not only from those courses I was following. I talked with students from Biology, History and Theology Graduation and also with one of Medical School. It was really interesting how their notion of space and time was different and how they enjoyed the college experience in different ways and places.
Well, after collecting all these data, I organized them using Evernote, where I could place texts, pictures and recordings of the field time. Than we categorized the content and placed it all in a table. After that we found some patterns, made a report and sent it to the PhD candidate that had contracted us.
It was a full immersive experience that brought many different aspects of ethnography and research methods that showed useful to many other job experiences that had come after.
