Angela Tabone-Leske, a Rennes SB student who dared to believe in herself!

Rennes School of Business is particularly proud of its students when they create their own projects, dare to believe in themselves and, especially, when they thrive.

Angela is one of many talented students from Rennes SB who has found a way to combine their personal interests and passions with their professional aspirations. A current student of the Master of Science in Creative Project Management, Culture and Design at Rennes SB, Angela recently launched her own podcast called ‘L’Art Trotter’ (in French) in which she talks about culture with a range of international cultural players. It has long been her dream to work in the music industry, so she took advantage of her programme at Rennes SB to do an internship in cultural activites and a second in the sponsorship division (securing public and private partnerships) with the association ‘Les Concerts de Poche’.

In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the string of lockdowns that came with it,  Angela decided to turn the restrictions into an opportunity. She decided to find a way to refine her professional project and pursue her dream of working in music while developing her network remotely and helping other students discover the cultural sector. The obvious choice for Angela was to launch a podcast that allowed her to do something she feels passionately about: monitoring, meeting people and hearing about their experience.

“I didn’t know anything about launching a podcast. I taught myself by watching tutorials and listening to a lot of other podcasts. I did some monitoring and asked for advice on how to finetune what my podcast was about. I have made gradual progress and adjusted my project as it went along, in a process of continuous improvement.”

This project gives Angela the opportunity to put the skills she has acquired during her master’s to good use, building on modules about constructing a business plan and managing projects. She finds that she is able to take pleasure in this project that she creates and manages according to her own criteria.

“The cultural sector is often described as inaccessible; people say that it is difficult to get a foot in the door. By launching this podcast, I wanted to show that the people and professionals in this sector are just people like anyone else, and I wanted to “bring a little culture” to my listeners at the same time.”

Her project is taking shape and she hosted her first guest in December 2020. She records her episodes as she goes along so that she can take a step back and analyse what works and what needs to be improved. Her primary goal was to understand what her audience wanted to hear about. She quickly understood that her podcast should not only talk about her guests’ CVs but should emphasise their life experience and their individual journey, topics that particularly interest her listeners who are mostly made up of students and young graduates.

“You can feel it when a project is feasible. But sometimes, we need a trigger, a final push. I decided to put my project on paper and talk about it with everyone around me.”  She interacted with Rémi Rivas, a Designer Consultant specialising in design thinking and innovation, and Astrid Charnier, a freelance events project manager, both of whom are Alumni from Rennes School of Business. She was able to gain concrete advice from both Rémi and Astrid which allowed her to move forward with her project with a feeling of support.

A final piece of advice from Angela for all those who have an idea or a project and who haven’t dared to get started…yet! “You have to set a deadline. As long as it’s not on your calendar, you have an excuse not to get on with it. Sometimes, I stayed up until 3 am to finish editing an episode of my podcast because I had a release deadline. It had to come out. I couldn’t wait to see what my listeners would think!”

Many thanks to Angela for the time she has given us to produce this article. We wish her all the best with this and all her future endeavours!