Hi and thank you for taking time to read through my personal introduction. My name is Dean and I am a recent Masters graduate in Social Anthropology at The University of Manchester. I am currently based in the North West of England, a short commuting distance to many of the region’s major cities, including Liverpool and Manchester. I have also spent time living in various other parts of the world including Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Most noteworthy was probably my time living in Africa, were I first volunteered in underdeveloped areas of Kenya carrying out construction and conservation projects, aimed at providing better access to education and employment for local communities. After this, I volunteered in an orphanage in Morocco (The Village of Hope), where I taught basic English and Maths and later trekked across the Atlas Mountains to raise money for said orphanage. This was followed by helping to setup a sensory facility for children with disabilities in Marrakesh. I can demonstrate research experience in the field of digital and social anthropology. For example, my Masters dissertation is entitled How do humans learn to embody the inter-subjective conditions for being in the world? An ethnographic study of gaming in virtual spaces, and was concerned with exploring what difference it makes to the inter-subjective sociality of gaming when play takes place in virtual worlds. I have a wealth of experience managing varied workloads as, having worked in hospitality for many years, I learnt how to juggle a lot of different roles and responsibilities. This has further strengthened my ability to prioritise tasks, demonstrated most recently by my ability to maintain full time employment and full time studies, all while still delivering on professional and academic projects within fixed time frames. I have taken part in, and assisted others, in interdisciplinary research projects, one of which was entitled Irrationality and storytelling: methods of coping. In this project I was part of a team, which included members with backgrounds in digital, medical and visual anthropology, as well as Creative Writing, biomedicine and the occult. In the project, we examined the use of stories and storytelling as a method of coping and making sense of irrational and painful existences. In doing so, we drew on our collective experience and worked across different academic disciplines and levels of involvement with various forms of storytelling media to present our findings and conclusions. Both this project, and the dissertation I discussed above, attest to my organisational skills when it comes to managing a research project and when working under my own initiative or prioritising my own work. Furthermore, it demonstrates my ability to assist others in a team based research project. I have experience using SPSS and Nvivo. Beyond the production of these assignments and dissertation, my research project outputs have included presenting at the fourth annual Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society (LINCS), under the topic of Digital spaces, places and traveling, which took place on 16th and 17th June 2021. A recording of which can be viewed here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3BTGH4YJDs&list=PLbOes6S_o2SRViOw6IG4dkRB5vq6y6ORq&index=4. I also presented at the TASP conference in May 2022, around the theme of liminality in the study of play - https://youtu.be/K_cAbb5Iiqk. Not only does this demonstrate my ability to manage research project outputs, it also highlights my capability to present data at conferences. I have had experience of managing digital content in several of my professional roles, although I wish to stress that this is not strictly my area of expertise. This includes, but is not limited to, the advertisement of the business in question, recruiting and working with digital specialists, such as; SEO, PPC, Social, UX, Mobile, Digital Planning, PHP, .Net, Java or similar. I also manage my own digital content (https://sites.google.com/view/dean-portfolio/home), which includes information about a number of the projects I have worked on recently. In my spare time I maintain several online communities built around my hobbies (i.e. Discord, Reddit, Roll20, etc). I have experience utilising social media channels and their functionality, both professionally and personally. Whether this is advertising (and tracking) special offers for the business on Facebook, highlighting new products on Instagram (whilst measuring metrics), building community connections on Twitter and Reddit and forging professional/recruitment connections on LinkedIn. I have some base level experience with design software, HTML, coding and UX. I am a unite the union member of many years and am currently working towards unionising my workplace.   Thank you for your time.   Yours sincerely, Dean James McIntyre