Flynn Duggan

Media, Marketing and Communications Volunteer

Flynn Duggan holding a camera

Flynn Duggan is a Marketing and Management student within the Business School at Loughborough. At the moment he is on placement with Glaxo Smith Kline within a business role, but also Dan Photography at the weekends and when he gets a spare minute.

Tell us about your prior experience in media before beginning your role:

Before I came to Loughborough, I had a keen interest in Basketball and so had the love for Basketball even before joining as a MMC Volunteer. I thought that would be something that would be really good to get involved in. So I contacted the Instagram page and those who ran it and they was kind enough to get me involved. So almost from week one there were opportunities there to make the most of.

And so, from minute one, I was taking photos and being lent a camera from the basketball department, which to be able to deal with equipment, which probably costs more than my student loans, was great because I wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise. So, gaining that exposure with professional equipment was something I was really grateful for and learned really quickly from people who were really experienced.

What were your main responsibilities?

So particularly this year I was the MMC for basketball. It was kind of split responsibilities, making sure there was full coverage of basketball teams. You have a Division One team which plays on a Saturday, but you also have four men's teams, three women's teams and development teams trying to get coverage of all of them teams, whether it's a training or games.

I'm putting graphics out if they win or potentially lose is, so there's lots of elements to it and not just the photography. There's graphic design within it. If you're sort of looking to do graphic design, I've been able to have some of my designs uploaded to the page, so there's plenty of scope.

Making sure players got their photos after the game was also really important, because if they see you on the end line with a camera and they often want to see the photos, so making sure they were distributed nice and quickly and just providing an online presence for the basketball programme was really important to make sure if people wanted to watch the games they knew when they were.

What was your proudest achievement in this role?

I would say my biggest achievement was potentially working with the brilliant athletes and seeing them come on to campus, it is a great way to expand your portfolio just because there's so much support going on. So, when Anthony Joshua came to look at training at Loughborough, I sort of manifested that I would hopefully take photos of him and eventually I got that opportunity obviously through demonstrating my work with Loughborough Basketball and around campus. All through volunteering, I was able to sort of go to them and say I've done this on campus and hopefully I can be sort of an asset to you guys and that turned from me just going in once and taking a few photos, probably more for My Portfolio than being useful for them. But I guess they liked what they saw, and they kept me in for almost, I think like an 8-to-12-week period. Now one of my photos is AJs profile picture on Instagram so all that sort of stuff really snowballed from being a volunteer as part of the MMC programme and gaining that exposure to working with one of the, like the best athletes in the world. It's still surreal to this point for sure.

How has being a MMC volunteer impacted your career plans?

Photography was very much a hobby and something which I was pretty rubbish at. I'm not saying I'm any better now, but I definitely think with photography, when you capture a moment which is often lost without any video or photo, to be able to bring that back up to someone, and in sometimes what is a good photo is like something which I think I'll started to get almost addicted to the feeling of so I think just constantly taking it up a level and trying demand that of myself. For example, doing a certain amount of photography a week or work with different sports or different athletes.

I'm definitely seeing it as more of a serious career option and more recently I've been a Newcastle United photographer for a Premier League game so it shows it can really snowball from literally picking up a camera and within sort of year and a half now, working with well known athletes and premier league teams, which makes me think there might actually be a career path in there somewhere.

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