A scholarship helped Bethany Edgoose get started on a creative career path that has taken her around the world.
Bethany Edgoose fell hard for London on her first visit – and it is a love affair that has endured.
While her career has taken her around the globe, the English capital is now home for this Bachelor of International Studies graduate. She is captivated by its history.
“I love walking down the street and knowing that there's a thousand years of people who have walked down this exact street,” she says. “To be a tiny little speck of a city's long-term history … to feel part of that in a small way is really exciting to me.”
Bethany had always hoped to live overseas and worked as a waitress and in a supermarket while at school to fund her passion for travel. An RMIT Achievement Scholarship awarded when she started at the University helped cover the costs of a stint as a volunteer in West Africa.
“I had borrowed some money from my parents to pay for that trip. My HECS debt was accumulating, but receiving the scholarship meant I knew I would be able to pay this debt off,” she says.
More than that, she says the scholarship was great acknowledgement of the hard work she’d put into her learning.
I felt recognised. It was a very joyful way to begin university.
Bethany excelled at RMIT, winning several awards and graduating in 2013 with First Class Honours. She set her sights on a career in international development but after spending some time in the field, began to wonder if it was the right fit.
Bethany Edgoose
Working in Uganda, where she was setting up income generation projects for women, she found herself spending a lot of time helping local staff build websites and blogs, and fix IT issues.
“Even if I wasn’t very good with computers at that point in life, I had a bit more experience than my Ugandan colleagues,” she says.
“I thought, this is a set of skills that is really useful – not only the technical capacity, but working out ways to tell stories and communicate, and translate the experience of people who are on the ground into a piece of media that they can share or that other people can access.”
Eventually, that realisation led her to a role with a cybersecurity firm in London where she was able to learn the technical skills she craved.
“We ended up growing an entire team, across three continents, of social science graduates who were already well-practised in translating complex ideas into written communication,” she says.
“We all learned the basics of internet protocols, computer risk modelling and machine learning so we were able to understand these concepts and, in some cases, implement them.”
At this point Bethany’s husband, Nathan Su, was finishing his architecture studies in London and developing an interest in filmmaking and creating virtual environments. Together, they started building a portfolio of digital storytelling projects alongside their day jobs.
They moved to the US when Nathan was offered a teaching post in Los Angeles. There, her growing skill in video editing proved in demand and convinced her that when they returned to London, their side gig – branded Inferstudio – could become their main business.
Today, Inferstudio is both an artistic practice and service provider. As well as developing their own creative projects, Bethany, Nathan and their team work with a lot of academic institutions that want complex research information presented in a digestible form – whether film, a website, publication or installation.
“We have many different ways of working but the topics that we work on end up being where the consistency lies,” Bethany says.
“We often work with researchers in environment and the impact of climate change and different ecological challenges, and social justice issues – stories of large-scale societal inequities, discrimination.”
For Bethany, this is a natural extension of the interests that first led her to her International Studies degree at RMIT, and later a Master of Science in Anthropology and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
“The initial interests that I had have acted as a bit of a compass that have consistently drawn me back towards thinking about how we can live as a society in a way that is healthier and more respectful of our environment and of each other,” she says.
She’s also seen another student dream come full circle.
“When I was applying for work experience and internships as a student, I wanted to work at the UN. It’s very hard as their programs are often years long, with no income, so I never found a UN internship that I could afford to do,” she says.
“But next year our company will be presenting a series of films at the United Nations Oceans Conference – so finally I’m there.”
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