How To Get That Edge Over Your Classroom Competitors

Hey whats up Longhorngreenback!
That’s a great way to think about it. For the biggest competitor is always about testing how hard you’re willing to work to achieve your goals! Personally, I have found it to be even extra motivating to do even better if I have a secret competitor. Always keeps me on my feet and alert.

Hey whats up Longhorngreenback!
That’s a great way to think about it. For the biggest competitor is always about testing how hard you’re willing to work to achieve your goals! Personally, I have found it to be even extra motivating to do even better if I have a secret competitor. Always keeps me on my feet and alert.[/quote]

I’ve always had "secret competitors - those individuals who out perform me in a skill set that i want. I follow them i try and learn from them in the hopes i will either rise to their level / surpass them or simply see the professional gain from myself. And it is not always design. I use to work with a designer when i was fresh out of school who when in meetings would make comments and the entire room would stop/listen/ and ponder his thoughts. He truly managed the audience. and i thought to myself “I want to be that Designer”

I still do the same as well. #lifegoals

The tone of the video really rubs me the wrong way. The first bit about designers being passionate, creative, etc - the design discipline hardly has a monopoly on those characteristics, and it’s offputting when you hear inexperienced student designers expound that BS and believe it. Design is about collaborating with lots of creative people in lots of disciplines - recognizing their creativity and ability to contribute - and working together as a team to solve ill-defined problems. There’s no room for divas, and that view - that designers are unique, special snowflakes - encourages insufferable diva behavior. While there is a small bit of useful and obvious advice in the video (yes, you should know how to present your work in a way that highlights the useful parts of the solution), it feels like the approach it promotes prioritizes style over substance, which is not helpful.

If you have a rock star designer throwing up 5 extra awesome sketches every class. And you usually do three 3 extra. Well in order to outperform yourself you only need to do 4. Well guess what you just got beat.

A competitive atmosphere pushes you further than you though was possible. Sure you may be up to 3am getting it done, but in the end you got it done.

If the assignment is 20 sketches, and you produce excellent work and also get sleep…I think the guy that did less, did well, and slept won. File under: time management/expectation management.

Amen brother.

While thats true and important in the working world, where your trying to balance life and work. At some point you gotta put in the 10,000 hours to get good at your craft. College is where the is easiest and most encouraged to happen. If you’re comfortable in college your not growing. (But maybe that view was skewed by knowing I was paying hundred of dollars a credit hour to be there.) But to me the guy who pushed himself and is better because of it wins in the end. It’s a marathon not a sprint.


I remember one professor (Sooshin) at DAAP giving his advice. "If you have a girlfriend and she asks you for one rose, do you give her just one rose? No you give her a bouquet. " Something like that. In college this is totally true where your trying to get better/faster.

When your in the real world all I care is that you can deliver the work in the hours allotted. But in order to do that you gotta put in the practice to get good, then fast and eventually efficient.

If your fast/efficient/good in college then your the superstar everyones trying to catch.

I remember one professor (Sooshin) at DAAP giving his advice. "If you have a girlfriend and she asks you for one rose, do you give her just one rose? No you give her a bouquet. " Something like that. In college this is totally true where your trying to get better/faster.

Then assign 25 sketches if the expectation is 25 sketches.

I agree that designers have no monopoly on passion in the process. I’ve worked with dispassionate designers, and I’ve worked with very creative and passionate marketing people, engineers, and sales people. In a lot of cases the sales people I’ve worked with have been some of the most passionate and excited about new product. They can be the most difficult as well and I think it is because their very livelihood spend on how much they can sell of the things the NPD team has produced, so getting them onboard and excited is pretty key to success. I try to remember that a lot of times the sales guys got into this because they love this product category, so drawing on that common ground you can get places. But if you alienate them you just pound against a brick wall. I’m saying this based on mistakes I’ve made personally in this area. I didn’t talk in an language that included them and i didn’t listen enough and it contributed to a poor performing line that year insight of having a clear insight based on user needs/desires.

I can get onboard with this. as you grow as a designer things appear to be more “intuitive” but the intuition is just experience multiplied by ability. The effect is this compounding sense for how to do things, but it takes a ton of hard work up front that a lot of folks are not willing to put in. Which is totally fine by the way. A team can’t be stacked with all Michael Jordans. You need your super stars and your role players.

Quite frankly, Professor Sooshin would be a horrible manager.

College is to prepare you for reality. As a manager, I know how much time is allotted and what is a reasonable expectation of deliverables for that time. 3 things can happen. My associate can make the deliverables on time. No harm no foul. My associate can make the deliverables in less time. I get more profit and the associate advances and they can use the “saved” time for other purposes. My associate needs more time to make the deliverables. I get less profit and the associate is shown the door.

But let’s talk about an academic setting. If any professor is grading on something other than the expectation they outlined, they should be fired. If I assign 20 and you do 25, I will only consider the top 20 you gave. The other 5 are inconsequential and it would be unethical to consider them as I would be perpetrating a fraud. You could argue if you have the 5 throw-aways, your top 20 may be better. But then again, maybe you should just concentrate on making a great 20.

But he’s not a manager, he’s a professor. And I think theres a major difference.

In my opinion, outside of keeping scholarships. Grades mean nothing in design school. I’m not even sure my actual degree matters. Sure this matters in some majors, but in a profession where portfolio rules, very few care what your GPA in college was. (Sure theres gonna be someone that points out the exception, I work at a major cooperation with strict hiring practices. But I would wager portfolio trumps all in the end.)


You could argue if you have the 5 throw-aways, your top 20 may be better. But then again, maybe you should just concentrate on making a great 20.

Exactly. This was his way of saying do more than you’re asked. Grades were always done on what your presented. For those who did more, it showed. We were always taught that your first 5-20 ideas sucked, they were the expected solutions. So get those out of the way so you could get to the creative stuff. I think this is very true as a student, where your not only learning how to easily communicate your ideas, but learning the process in generating those ideas to begin with.

For students if you can do 20 great concepts right out of the gate, then your golden. But I don’t think it works like that for the majority.

Theres also the train of thought that if your counting the sketches to get the project done in college, then your gonna have problems down the line. You should sit down, and just sketch to solve the problem, maybe that takes you 30-40. If you love this, you shouldn’t really be “counting” in college. You don’t have scoped time to devote in college.

Also I think theres an interesting dynamic is schools, where they’re trying to balance real life expectation and a schooling environment. Should studios be exact replicas of work environments? Is that the most effective way of teaching kids? I’m not sure? DAAP allowed us to alternate between work internships and college studio environments every 4 months. So it was interesting to see the differences. But even internships and realife are vastly difference.

Are students better prepared by mimicking the rigorous scope/ deadlines of real design work. Or is this environments of pushing student designers far beyond whats expected better? If a bit unrealistic of how the real world works.

I personally think the later produces better designers in the end, but thats just my view.

Some good convo on here.

2 things that stick out to me on the latest posts, education style, and expectations.

I’m not an educator, but I don’t think the school should be a duplicate of the professional studio. The school by nature is an academic environment and there are some things better learned in that setting, protected from industry, where it is safe to explore and learn. As Emman said, UC has the unique alternating Co-op program which is a great balance. You get the benefits of apprenticeships alternating with academic periods where you can absorb and process… that said, the academic can’t ignore the professional world. It can be informed by it, respond to it, and hopefully help shape the direction of the professional world.

When I did teach, I always gave points for exceeding expectations, but it can be a double edge sword. If the assignment is to do 20 sketches, and you 25, but they all are terrible, it isn’t going to go well. One of the techniques that my professors used to do was assign 30 concepts, but only post up your top 5. That way if you did 30, 40, or 50, it din’t matter. the only thing that mattered was could you accurately judge and select your top 5… of course you could do 5 good ones and phone the rest in with crap… nothing is perfect I guess! The other 25 concepts would be in a pile and they would randomly count a few of the students, or flip through to see if they picked their best 5.

This going way OT, but some great convo. The last few conversations that have caught on remind me a bit more of the old days of deep and thoughtful discussion. I dig it.

I’ll have to disagree. The job of a good manager is to elevate an associate to the next level, making them more valuable to the organization. How is that different from what a professor does?

While a professor may start with something extremely raw, but as you mention it’s the work that matters and not the grade, ID can be done with an apprenticeship. No need for grades or school for that matter. How would a manager and a professor differ then?

Time is time. Some need more than others. Some will be more efficient and more profitable. And yes, more practice will make you better in most cases. Do the practice on your time, not mine. Yay capitalism.

An academic setting can allow concentration in a particular area of product development, work on color theory for the semester. A good manager can also manage associates to their strengths which may lead them to be a specialist in a particular area. I’ve got folks great at the front end and I’ve got folks great at the back end. Very similar to an academic setting with the only difference that a newb has no clue what and what not are their strengths.

iab, I do think that some things are better learned in an academic environment, but you could probably compress a lot of that into a shorter program. The class I had that I think benefited me in a pure academic setting were: art/architectural history, writing, presentation/public speaking (was an elective, but great for creative people to take), classical figure drawing, 2d theory, 3d theory. Pretty much everything after that could have been an apprenticeship, but rapid viz, model making, and CAD were nice to take as separate classes without the pressure of having to learn on a client. I don’t think most clients or corporations would want to pay to train their apprentices. Even if they were unpaid apprenticeships, they would be taking your senior designer and design manager’s time, during their hours.

I’d agree completely.

But my point is that there is little difference between a professor and a manager. Both do project and people management. Sure the structure of a project is different in academia than the professional world. You can have a CAD class, color theory class, a shop class, etc. That concentration of task is probably a better way to learn.

I didn’t bother with the OP’s video because I really don’t care as it likely has no pertinence to what I do. But as a manager, project and people, if I ask for 1 flower and you bring me a dozen, it smacks a brown-nosing and it will reflect poorly on you. Or worse, you didn’t do what I asked you to do. I may be mistaken but Sain may think that is a good thing. It isn’t.

When i was a adjunct i found many students poorly prepared to enter the “business” of design - no slight on the level of educators but some had been out of the work field for a long time or only had academic experience although they were and are very talented designers.

As a professor it ones job to help grow and prepare the students to enter the field in a somewhat protected and nurturing environment and to encourage not discourage. But applying real world expectations and criteria is important and they should be more enforced vi progression form 1st year to the 4th year.

I was amazed when I would have students not have work completed on the due date and the excuse would be “so and so teacher always gives us extensions so we figured you would” and they were not too happy to be informed

  1. They are automatically deducted 20%
  2. It is a insult to give them a extension when other completed the work on time
  3. IN real world this would happen once or twice and then they would be let go
  4. The fact none of them provided a heads up or reason that the work would be late was unacceptable.

Their response “that’s unfair” my response “did you not read the syllabus” – there are many more real world expectations that I taught as well and some students didn’t like it but grew to appreciate them (even to the point where they would thank me years later) and some thought I was simply a prick……

Thats the part I think is different for a professor and a manager. A professor shouldn’t care if you overdeliver. They are not managing a timeline or budget. They don’t know/care if that rendering took you 1 hour or 10. They just care that you have the rendering. I can’t imagine an art history professor asking you how many hours you spent writing your paper, an editor might care but not your professor. So why should your studio professor care how many hours each rendering took? (They shouldn’t because 19 year old Sain never took art classes in high school so it takes him 2 hours to draw a box in perspective. While Art prodigy super star student can speed paint a car concept in 30 minutes. In the end they both need to present whats required. )

Even in the real world people hardly ever ask for “10 concepts”. They ask for you to spend 40 hours to finish Round 1, that has 10 high fidelity photoshop concepts and all the required formatting, mood boards, etc. Designers are going to draw way more than just the 10 concepts, throw out bad ones, remix a few, and eventually narrow it down for the preso. But all within the allotted time/budget.

Over delivering to a client is a bad thing it sets prescient for work moving forward. This week you spent 80 hours on 40 hours of paid work. Next time you deliver 40 hours of work they’re going to expect work at the 80 level. (Unless your in an SF consultancy then its always expected :confused: )

But in college you get the assignment “Show up next class with 10 concepts” One student can show up with the first 10 concepts they did that took them a few hours. The other can show up with 10 concepts, that took them the same hours to do, but then they spent the next 5 hours drawing 10 more concepts, refining them, redrawing and getting the perspective perfect. You’ll present your 10 super concepts and have the rest in your sketch stack on your desk.

What I’m saying: In college the professor doesn’t care if you “over deliver” by spending all the time between classes working on the project (your classmates might). Be the person that spends the extra hours refining your concepts, it’ll pay dividends when you graduate.

Even in the real world people hardly ever ask for “10 concepts”. They ask for you to spend 40 hours to finish Round 1, that has 10 high fidelity photoshop concepts and all the required formatting, mood boards, etc. Designers are going to draw way more than just the 10 concepts, throw out bad ones, remix a few, and eventually narrow it down for the preso. But all within the allotted time/budget.

So…in the real world example above, you were asked for 10 concepts, as outlined in the Round 1 deliverables. Did I miss something?

Maybe what’s missing in this conversation is that the job of academia is to teach students how to think about and solve product problems, and that fancy renderings are but one tool in the toolkit. The thought process, however it is capped in the end (fancy renderings, models, a meeting, diagrams and workflows, whiteboard notes, whatever), needs to be fed with process work that shows the reasoning and proof.

As to overdelivering or pushing themselves beyond the limit, students are free to do that, but it’s going to cost them when they find themselves sick from stress, exhaustion, bad diet, and lack of sleep.

Nope you’re right, the real world is 10 concepts in X amount of hours. Academia it’s 10 concepts by this deadline. The shift in the way the work is framed allows students the opportunity to spend the extra time to get it right. (whether that means more time concepting, sketching, etc) So you have the opportunity to really push your designs and your skill set during this time.

I think that a competitive school environment where students are pushing themselves project after project to outperform themselves and classmates, leads to greater growth and produces stronger designers. Putting in the late night hours during school will pay dividends when your graduate and try to find a job. Going back to OPs original message, my thought is that the competition between students, pushes the entire class upwards.

There other side of the argument seems to be that, this produces diva designers and it enforces unhealthy habits. It also isn’t how real world projects work and school should potentially try and follow a structure closer to that. Example not over delivering, etc. In the real world your not competing with your fellow designers your collaborating. (paraphrasing a few others points)