Recruitment Videos

BBSP Recruitment Video Project

You may have heard (or won’t be surprised to hear) that BBSP interviews and recruitment will be virtual this year. Likely you remember (hopefully fondly) your interview visit to UNC – the faculty and students you met, the dinners, seeing the area and all it has to offer. We want to make sure applicants this year can experience the great features of UNC’s research, community, and the Triangle area.

To do this, we are organizing a video project where we are collecting short videos from current graduate students on each of these topics:

Video Prompts

1. Why did you choose BBSP?  What are your favorite aspects of being a UNC grad student?
2. Show us your lab! What does your lab study? Why do you like your lab? Show us around the space. Remember, the interviewing students this year won’t get to come onto campus, so it will be important for them to see some lab spaces virtually!
3. Housing tour.  Give a quick tour of your house/apartment/complex. Feel free to also include some info about what you pay monthly, how you get to campus, do you have roommates, etc.
4. What do you do for fun outside of lab? Show us something in the area you like to do that isn’t science related. A favorite hiking spot, brewery, restaurant, coffee shop, yoga studio, gym, etc.

Plan on making a short video? 

Sign up here!

Please sign up and indicate your intent to submit a video. This will help us plan and make sure we get enough submissions in each area. Each video clip should focus on one topic. We would like to collect all videos by November 15.

Tips for creating your video

Video

We recommend using the back camera of your smartphone to combine ease of use and best video quality. Asking someone else to take the video will be easiest, but if that’s not possible, please try to place the phone on a stable surface and preset the location of your chair/stool so that there is full coverage from head to waist. Try leaving some room above your head and on both sides of your shoulders for complete framing. Sitting by a window, facing natural daylight, OR, taking the video outdoors during early morning/late afternoon with the sun in front of you, will work best. If you want to move while talking or demo something in selfie mode, please do so outdoors. This will allow for ample lighting for a selfie mode video to look good.

Audio

Please try to ensure you are in a relatively quiet space without white noise such as standing fans, appliances or vehicles. Puppy yelps/baby cries/kitty meow interruptions are welcome! For volume, try to speak slightly louder than your conversation voice so that we can normalize everyone’s audio tracks without amplifying the background noise. The best way is to imagine you are addressing a large room without a microphone.

Video length

There is no set length requirement, but try to get across the information you’d like to convey as efficiently as you can. As a general rule, under 2 minutes is a good target. We will be doing some light editing to these clips, so don’t sweat making it perfect. The goal of these videos are not for them to be perfect Oscar winning performances, but to give applicants interested in BBSP an idea of what it’s like to be a grad student here at UNC!

Upload video

When you have completed your video, upload it here!

If you shot your video on your phone, you can upload at the link above from your phone.