PAINTING THE MAGIC IN MY NEW ROLE IS HARD | DAEP UPDATE #29 & #30

*ALL VIEWS ARE MY OWN AND NOT OF THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY, CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY OR YUMMY JOBS*

Hey there, pals!

At Avatar’s Flight of Passage, it can be very hard to create special moments for Guests (travellers) from Earth when you are conducting a very important study for the Pandora Conservation Initiative (PCI). With the safety of the travellers (Guests), PCI technicians and, most importantly, avatars as a top priority, it can prove quite a challenge to get the balance of experiment safety and traveller satisfaction right. And sometimes, this does not go down too well with some creatures (both human and avatar-kind)! This was a complete reverse of my Fairy Godmother training. Since I am one of the newer technicians to the PCI, I still could not help but think about my days as a Fairy Godmother in Training, as weird as it sounds. While the transition of the different forms of study is difficult, I took what I had learnt from my Fairy Godmother training with the little knights and princesses, especially the shy, more scared ones, and implement that to preparing humans for linking to their avatars and riding a banshee (dragon-like creature). This, for me, has been successful!

One of the advantages that I had with my transition from fairy school to the Pandora Conservation Initiative was that I had more free time before my experimental studying! So, a roommate and I decided to head to Epcot to explore the Festival of the Arts - the third festival that I got to experience. My roommate and I walked around World Showcase and saw all of the different artist stalls that were displaying their artwork, as well as taking some photos by some pretty cool Instagram walls like the butterfly wall (pictured below)!

These are my wings, and Disney taught me how to fly

At Epcot, they had a massive paint by number canvas set up on one of the construction walls in Future World and they had Cast Members positioned handing out little paint points to Guests allowing them to paint parts of the canvas. Together, with most of the squares filled in with colour, the image created was a series of colourful Figment faces!

I may not have found my feet just yet at Avatar’s Flight of Passage and the Pandora Conservation Initiative (PCI), but I know I will find my feet and grow as a PCI technician to paint my own special moment for a traveller (Guest) in the upcoming months!

Sadly, my time painting magic while conducting the avatar linking experiments at the PCI was cut short. You may have seen updates already from news sources and other blogs on social media, but my Disney adventure was cut three months sooner than I had expected and I returned home to the UK last month. I still have a couple more updates to release for you, so for now I am going to enjoy reliving the memories I had made during the last few weeks of my Disney Academic Exchange Program.

Thank you so much for reading and please stay safe during these unprecedented times! Have a magical day!

-Hannah

DISCLAIMER: this blog is my personal experience on the Disney Academic Exchange Program (DAEP) 2019-2020 and may not reflect everyone’s experience. Other programs and future participants on the DAEP may have slight adjustments to their programs that may not be featured in any of my blog posts. That being said, if you do leave any questions, I will try to answer them as best as I possibly can 😊