John Gardiner

John Gardiner (Bachelor of Arts '97) works at Vancouver Island University as a Photographer/Videographer and Social Media Coordinator. While attending VIU, he worked as an editor of the student newspaper, The Navigator, which inspired him to start up his own twice-monthly local newspaper called Nanaimo at Night, which he owned and operated during his last year at university. After graduating from VIU with his Bachelor of Arts, John worked as a freelance writer for various publications in Canada, including The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun, CBC Radio and Urban Male Magazine. He went on to work for several years as the Director of the Nanaimo Arts Council where he helped found the Islands Short Fiction Contest and the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival. When he first started at VIU, he worked as a Writer/Photographer responsible for media relations, writing press releases and taking photos for institutional marketing materials. From there, John's love of photography and videography got him his current position in the Strategic Marketing department, where he helps coordinate VIU's social media pages, organizes photoshoots and creates videos to help promote programs on campus. In his spare time, he is a short film maker who has won several awards for his work.

"My degree from VIU opened up all kinds of opportunities for me," he says. "My writing and critical thinking skills, which were developed and enhanced during my BA, made it easy for me to adapt to a constantly changing workforce. I wanted to work as a writer and found that those skills were needed in all kinds of job openings – from writing grant proposals and press releases, to promotion for events and writing scripts for promotional videos. Without my degree, my career choices would have been severely limited."