Scott is old high school friend I recently connected with on Facebook. In a call for stories, he was quick to respond. Initially overwhelmed by the length (yep, you’ll have to commit to at least 3 whole minutes), I did a quick glance through and thought it would be fine to post. But as I was getting ready to post it up here, I realized how inspirational it is. How many of us take the safe route, THE WRONG ROUTE, because of external or maybe even internal pressures rather than following our gut and our dreams? Scott listened to his dreams for his foray into grad school. Seems like it worked out pretty darn well for him. Hopefully if you are in grad school you can say like Scott did, that grad school is AWESOME!!
I completed my undergraduate degree at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, and entered the adult world sure of only one thing: I wanted nothing to do with managing hotels or restaurants. Ever. So I was 22 years old, with a prestigious Ivy League education that I had no intention of using, no idea what I wanted to do, and a vague sense that I had missed out on doing anything interesting with my life. I loved music and art, but had declined to get an education in either, because parents, teachers, guidance counselors, etc. had convinced me that there were no real careers to be had in the arts.
I had a scant number of elective courses in college, and I spent all of them on music and writing classes. My concentration within my major was interior design. But with only a few classes in the discipline, I wasn’t even able to get an internship at a design firm. So I took a job that I could get, as a securities administrator at a bank. Then another job as a marketing intern. Then another job as an event planner in a marketing department. Then another one as a marketing coordinator. I dreamt of being a musician, a copywriter, a designer of anything, and every time I interviewed I would get the same response: Where have you written/designed before? Nowhere. Nobody would let me.
It was at that last marketing coordinator job that I started having the opportunity to design some banner ads. I also made some demonstration videos of the company’s product. I was eager to learn, and they let me experiment. It was the first time I was happy working. At the same time I was moving from analog 4-track recording to a digital setup at home. When I was laid off from that job, I knew what I wanted to do.
I enrolled in a Masters program in Visual and Media arts at Emerson College. It was AWESOME. Due to my layoff and an unexpected extension of unemployment benefits I was able to be a full time student with no other responsibilities other than to create art with people all day, every day. I experimented, designed, programmed, recorded, wrote and filmed sometimes 60-80 hours a week. I read Deluze and Freud. I studied the language of film. I learned how to frame a picture. How to manage a project. How to tell a story. I learned Flash, Director, HTML, and CSS. I produced my first 2 records for actual clients. I met really creative people who challenged me and pushed me. I saw possibilities where before I only saw dead ends. During the second half of grad school, I had to work full time, and would put in 8 hours a day working before coming home and spending another 8 hours working on my thesis.
To be honest, my work from the second half of grad school wasn’t as good. I didn’t have as much energy. But the portfolio I had created during the first half was what began to get me freelance work. I worked freelance for years. First as an HTML developer, than as a Flash animator, then as a Visual Designer, and finally as an Information Architect/User Experience Designer. My client list….you know most of them. Your 401(k) is likely managed through a system I designed. I have worked in E-Commerce, in commercial brochure-ware, in kiosks and interactive events, in derivatives and money-market trading applications, in big data discovery and more. I think things up and draw pictures of them all day long. And then people actually build them. I work with creative and interesting people; people who are interested in what they do and interested in the possibilities of what could be. Before grad school, I was a lost kid in a dead end world. Now I am a full-time creative professional. Grad school saved my life.
