If I Knew Then What I Know (Advice to students)

gruv, that is horrible advice. The first year is everything. I found the foundation year to be the MOST important year of my design education.

Most schools won’t let you skip foundation year.

If I were going to do anything in the spirit of switching schools it would have been to taken a year of community college liberal arts classes so I could have focused more on studio.

I think different schools have different levels of relevance freshman year. In my opinion the thing I learned the most my foundation year was “this is what it’s going to be like being a designer” lots of very long and labor intensive projects with very short deadlines, lots of manual labor making things, even if the actual “design” of those things was almost completely irrelevant to the professors.

Same. Where I went to school you tended to learn two things freshman year:

1- Broad concepts you can apply to anything: form composition, color theory, drawing, history of art, architecture, and design, concepts behind modern art and design movements… This stuff is invaluable to me now

2- how to work really REALLY hard! Blood sweat and tears type stuff! This helped get me where I am.

In a third category, I also learned grades don’t matter. No one cares about your grade, they care about your work.

Design is truly Machiavelian. The ends justify the means. No one cares about excuses, they care about results!

I’m hoping you mean that bad grades doesn’t necessarily mean bad work, but good grades means good work.

In looking at job applications, do you not consider GPAs?

I never have. Yet I got great grades and scholarships in school I don’t think it ever made a difference. Portfolio is everything.

First year is not about practicing design it’s about getting you ready for design thinking and practice. I don’t think it’s the most most important but I don’t think you could do subsequent years without it. Not to mention, for most it’s a peek at what design is really about. Many go into id pretty blind and it’s a good opportunity to see if it’s right for you before wasting more te and money.

R

I’ve seen every combination of grades to work including students with great grades an horrible work. There is not neccesarily a correlation.

I’ve never asked for GPA. I’ve often asked to see more process.

I would agree that grades mean almost nothing. If your portfolio is solid I could care less that your GPA was brought down by a poor performance in your psychology class.

I actually was given some very mediocre grades in school, and in speaking to my professors after graduation they pointed out they gave me grades lower than my classmates not because my work was worse, but because they saw that I was not working up to my full potential, whereas students who got “A” work were as good as they saw they were going to get. After being mad as heck at the time I realized after graduation that C pushed me harder than ever to improve myself. It certainly didn’t help my GPA, but it absolutely pushed me to develop my portfolio. That alone makes me disregard anything about “GPA” on a CV.





I guess the portfolio is the grade that counts.

For those on the forum who also teach, what do you consider when grading? One of my lecturers told me they will pass people who they know ‘aren’t a danger to the community’ (“P’s get degrees”).

When I teach, grading is done of course based on a very detailed breakdown. For example-

Concept Design 30% (7.5/30 Visual Presentation, 7.5/30 Storytelling, 15/30 Concept)
Final Deign 35% (10/35 Visual Presentation, 10/35 Technical, 15/35 Concept )
Photoshop Rendering 35% (15/35 Visual Presentation, 20/35 Technical)
100%

That being said, it can be very difficult to determine the grades as it is all relative.

  1. Relative to the other students. ie. how is one student compared to the best and the worst in the class/school
  2. Relative to themselves. Is this a good project that could have been great if the student gave 100%
  3. Relative to the industry/field. The best in the class may not compare to the best in another school/program…

There is no formula for those factors. I use my best best judgement, and take a little bit of all into consideration.

R

When I have taught, I have done a similar breakdown to Richard, but I had a 4th category of “improvement”.

Thanks for that, good to know.

The relationship between the students is really nice.the school is learning environment for all of us in all aspects.

When I taught drawing, I graded the deliverables segment based on true professional level output. There’s no excuse not to be aware of what constitutes pro level output and the students need to be shown regularly what that is.

My advice;

  1. never get complacent, even if you think you’re the best of the best.
  2. never stop trying, even if you’re sure it’s impossible,
  3. impress yourself first, then others,
  4. beware the lollipop of mediocrity - lick it once and you’ll suck forever,
  5. save twice as much from your earnings as you think you should,
  6. every once in awhile buy something outrageous - it will keep you hungry for more,
  7. trust your instinct,
  8. don’t believe that dreams are unreachable - if you believe in something, go for it!

Great list! Couldn’t add a thing. Love #4. Going to have to use that.

R

There’s a ton of great tips in here. I don’t have many regrets from school (at least, that were ID related), but if I could go back and do it again, I would have liked to know at the beginning…

  • Don’t be afraid to invest big money in tools that help you do better work. It’s worth it.
  • First-name familiarity is priceless. Network your face off. Get to conferences (even if you hate IDSA), go to reviews, meet up with professionals whenever you get the chance.
  • Try to get a variety of internship experience. Designing for a corporate company is very different from working in a small firm with 4 other people.
  • Read/Watch/Listen to the news… and not just tech/gadget/design news.
  • Wherever you go, make it a point to watch other people do things. You’ll learn a lot.

nice list DesignNomad. All good tips.

For those aspiring toward a career in software interaction deign and user experience design, as I did when I was in ID school, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have even entered school. Instead, I would have gotten a job doing ANYTHING, even work for dirt cheap, at a shop developing software. Even if I was earning next to nothing, that would still be better than the thousands I spent on school and I’d have earned much more valuable real world experience.

In the software interaction and ux design worlds, nothing is more valuable than real world experience. In all of the jobs I’ve interviewed for, no one has ever asked to look at my portfolio.

Document EVERYTHING. Work in progress, scribbles, sketches, your process. Not just the finished object. Design is a journey and sometimes being able to demonstrate HOW you got to a particular solution is more important that the solution itself–especially when shopping your portfolio to prospective employers.

Showing up with an electronic file full of pretty renderings and finished models is unimpressive without including the steps involved to reach that final form. Anyone can parade a snazzy picture around and make all sorts of claims as to authorship and their involvement, but without the proof of your work–your ‘sweat-equity’–your A+ doodle is worthless in the business world.