Welcome to the real world.
Around the office on the morning of my 27th birthday I became a pop-up notification on everyone’s desktop. My Monday birthday consisted of a thoughtful balloon at my desk, surprisingly authentic Greek food, and cranking out two directions of a magazine spread fueled by a tight deadline. This is what being a real adult feels like on your birthday, I thought to myself. Going to work, not eating cake. This is what the rest of my birthdays will be like until I die.This is the real world that my Dad has been warning me about.
My friends pressured me to go out to the bars to celebrate, being the good friends they are, willing to sacrifice a good nights sleep for me, but I reluctantly declined. Why? Because I had to be in a lecture hall in front of 30 groggy college freshmen at 8:00am to teach a class and then go to my real job at the agency where I work the next day.. when did this happen?
The the first full-time design job I landed was by doing some freelance work while I was finishing up grad school, interviewing the day after graduation and starting a week later at the fast paced content marketing agency I had been doing contract work for. Towards the end of my final semester of grad school I was skipping class to do my real work. You know, work that mattered, the work that would eventually get me somewhere (not that silly ol’ degree I’ll be paying back until I’m 50-something). I was urged by many of my mentors who reviewed my portfolio to take any clue about what my age away. “You’re young and that’s good, but you don’t want to seem unexperienced” I heard, or “keep your age off, it makes you sound like you’re bragging.” Noted.
I began cranking out projects left and right once I had my first full-time design job, keeping up with the tight deadlines and managing client expectations of creating something out of the box but also on brand. This is what I had been waiting for, I was a real adult now. It wasn’t that three years I spent in Albania as a Peace Corps Volunteer, or the four years I spent as a college athlete, or the 25 years before in any regard… this is what I’ve been working for my entire life, I’ve made it.
From someone who was still in school during the cusp of the web design boom, I had still been taught design in a print focused program in undergrad. The only web design class that was offered was taught in DreamWeaver. My senior year I was in a Flash class but it was at 8:00am so I dropped it. Looking back this was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I then, however, shot myself in the foot by going to live in a developing country for three years. I was fortunate enough to have the perfect placement and designed a brand for the town I lived in that’s still being used today, had the opportunity to teach my coworkers how to type and even use Google Drive! But I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, not a designer.
Before I had my first job title that had the word designer in it, I was terrified to even classify myself as one. Scared that a real, older, more experienced designer would somehow find out that some kid fresh out of college, living in Albania, was calling herself a designer, and would somehow publicly shame me on the internet and it would ruin me.
I continued to design a Wordpress site for the local chapter of the gender and development committee in Albania. I also gathered all of the content for a tourism website for my part of the country. All of this was based off of my self taught web design skills, on content management systems, not in Dreamweaver. Woah, I can design for the web.
I dove head first in to learning as much about web design for free through the internet from my communist style apartment in the Albanian Alps. I continued the computer courses, got close with the mayor and even wrote some grants to start a basketball team. All the while, the internet was evolving and the iPhone was becoming more popular.
When I left for the Peace Corps in 2011 only the elite technologist had iPhones. They were only through one or two phone providers and had extremely insane data plans. Instagram was founded during my time in the Peace Corps, iPads were first released too. Somehow I had to keep up if I wanted to be a designer when I came home and not have an irrelevant degree. I remember when I first left Albania and met a few friends from home in Rome. “You have to download Instagram” they said as they scrolled through their Facebook on the first edition of an iPad. I quickly pulled out my Peace Corps issued phone and laughter filled the room.
John Mayer once forced us to reflect on our lives by saying “welcome to the real world she said to me condescendingly. Take a seat. Take your life, plot it out in black and white.” Well John Mayer, whoever the she is in this scenario is full of shit, which I totally get is your point. The real world is your entire life. It shouldn’t be defined once you get to a certain point in your life. I’ve been welcomed to this real world more than once and it’s typically a sarcastic response I interpret as “your childhood is over, now you can be as miserable as the rest of us.” This illusive and condescending welcome isn’t exactly too welcoming if you ask me.
I currently have the pleasure of working specialist in tons of fields everyday, with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I learn something new everyday. This is my loose interpretation of the real world. Absorbing everything you can from the people around you. I’m constantly picking the brains of my students, learning what is important or relevant to them. I know I probably get on the developers nerves at work asking them to review personal projects where I’m trying to wrap my head around coding.
When I was in Albania, I would spend hours in the grocery store in my neighborhood, listening to stories of life during communism and drinking Turkish coffees… learning about their real world, their reality; which was honestly nothing I could compare anything I had ever been exposed to before. No matter where I am I try to remember that everyone’s reality is different, whether that be in a post-communist country or in an extremely fast paced agency working for Fortune 500 companies. I try to make the best out of every situation that is my reality by learning from others who share it because they inevitably have a different perception than I do.
My Dad was really nervous about my decision to join the Peace Corps, especially because of the industry I’m in. “You’ll just be so far behind when you come home, how will you catch up?” I thought about that every time I was teaching myself about designing for mobile or how best design a website for nonprofits. My dad came and visited me in Albania, never have traveling far outside of the country previously. He used my Turkish toilet, adapted to the water schedule, slept in my apartment in the dead of summer without air conditioning and even sat in smoke filled cafes to listen to my coworkers talk about how good of a girl his daughter was. I’m not completely sure, but I think at 56-years-old, his idea of the real world changed a little too.
