Back at 'er

Ah, school. It's kinda nice to be back, in a truly loathsome way. After just a few classes, I once again feel like a doofus that realizes he barely knows what he's doing. There's a class where we need to create and market a new product. There's a lot of emphasis on the customer and target market, and I find myself struggling to really have my head in the game and doing something, anything that the professors don't need to give me major corrections on. I'm just not finding this level of strategizing very intuitive.

Mind you, I'm finding that the 4th year profs are really... Hesitant to give you any concrete feedback. Lots of "it's up to you" and "go with your gut". And I see the point - if we're supposed to be independent designers, we need to be able to pick a direction and pursue it. But at the same time, I feel like I don't know how to identify what directions are the strongest, and that I'll probably working with other designers that'd say "yeah, I think this works best - go with it." And not to mention that, as a graphic designer, it seems a bit far fetched for me to be deciding what products should be making it to market.

The program heads seem pretty bent on making us "content creators", though. So not only do we make it look purdy, but we make it itself. I see where they're going with it - it'll make us way more valuable to clients for being able to make said content, but it'll help us to better understand existing content. I think that, ideally, they're training us to be creative directors, but... I feel as though that's being really optimistic. Realistically, I think a slim fraction of us will ever progress to that point. Seriously, I can't imagine that there are enough creative director positions created each year within the country to support that kind of growth coming out of art/design institutions.

So there you have it - going back to school makes me feel kinda dumb and I have doubts as to the kind of career I'll be able to find after I'm done. That being said, this week I somehow got a scholarship given out to the top 1.5-2% of the program. The money, while nice, is kind of secondary to the realization that I'm one of the top students in my degree, if not the top student. That blows my mind more than a little bit, especially considering that I don't look at my grades and I work two part-time jobs. Something tells me that, just maybe, I'll turn out okay after I graduate...
-Cril

Coldplay - Life in Technicolor