My Path to Design School, Minus the Cliché
The messy, tenuous story of finding my way to a career in design
I’ve noticed something. The farther someone is from the early, tenuous years of their career, the more they tend to compress that part of their story, sometimes to the point of cliche: “I just had to find my passion.”
This telling may be true, but the flippancy and brevity of that narrative can be alienating to those still mired in that early path-finding themselves. That’s why I want to reflect on my own sticky, tenuous years now, while I’m still in them, in the hopes that telling my story as it’s still evolving may be more useful than a cliché.
But before I share the story about how I ended up where I am, a UX Design grad student at CMCI Studio, I think it’s important to remember what a story is.
Our lives only become narratives in retrospect, because we shape our experiences into stories. While we’re living through the day-to-day or choosing new adventures, large or small, it’s hard to say how any given moment will impact us or bring meaning to our lives. It’s hard to say which experiences will add up to a strong episodic arc and which are random outliers that foreshadow nothing.
And anyway, there are endless ways to tell a story from a single set of experiences. Which events do you emphasize, and why? Which lessons or outcomes do you highlight? What significance does it all have?
The way we tell our stories matters because it shows what we value and why. More crucially, it also sets the stage for what happens next — the choices we continue to make, the meaning we pull out of ongoing experiences, the people we are becoming. Remember that — it comes into play in Act 2.
So, here it is. One aspiring UX designer’s meandering pathway from square one to grad school.
Act 1: A Decade of Aimlessness* Slides By
*Or exploration, depending on how I tell the story.
“Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere.” — E.M. Forster
In my early 20’s, I lived in the chaos that comes when the bachelor’s degree has been earned but no career direction has yet crystallized. I graduated college right when the Recession hit and got a job through a temp agency. I helped run an indie bookstore and art gallery in Austin. I cooked Sunday dinner for my friends every weekend. I watched them start law school, medical school, their PhDs. I felt overwhelmed. I saved up enough to opt out, and ran around South America for a while writing about travel and escape.
I taught ESL (English as a Second Language) in Boston and read a lot of books. I tried to start running. I worked for an artist and traveled a lot more. I started a cooking blog then abandoned it. I spent a year at a community college earning science credits, got into a masters program for Nutrition, and didn’t go.
I tried to start running again. I compared myself to my family, all pilots and doctors, who have tidy and successful career stories and are also runners. I felt aimless. I felt embarrassed.
I designed a few websites for friends and had no idea what I was doing. I needed health insurance. I learned marketing on the job and got promoted. I let organizational needs shape my career progression because I didn’t know how to shape it myself. I finally started running. I talked to a lot of people. Everyone had different advice.
Act 2: A Metaphor about an Octopus Takes Hold
“No one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path — except you.” — Wait But Why
This was pretty much the state of things last spring, when I ran across this very long article about picking a career. It changed the way I thought about everything. Specifically, it shifted a fundamental schema I had internalized based on the myth that there was one “right” career path out there waiting for me, if only I could find it. That myth had paralyzed me, creating a cycle where I fell into opportunities out of necessity or desperation instead of proactively creating opportunities.
The article (which is by Tim Urban of Wait But Why and which you should absolutely read if adulting makes you feel lost) uses the extended metaphor of a “yearning octopus” to make a key point:
Each of us has a complex set of needs, wishes, and goals related to the personal, moral, practical, social, and recreational arenas of life. Those needs and wishes come from many places — our own secret desires, expectations of others, cultural norms — though sometimes its hard to figure out where our own internal wants end and external pressures begin. Regardless of where they come from, it’s inevitable that our needs and wishes are often at odds with each other, putting each of us in a constant catch-22. There’s no way to satisfy them all.
For example, your recreational octopus limb wants you to be rich so you can travel and have all the hobbies, but your practical limb argues that being debt-free is the only important thing, and the moral limb feels guilty about everything you already have because, hello, look at how privileged you are!
Armed with this new metaphor (and I love a good metaphor), I understood that my meandering method of pathfinding wasn’t abnormal or wrong or embarrassing. It was simply the natural outcome of conflicting needs and wishes battling for airtime in the absence of a strong career narrative.
I realized that I needed to create a working narrative for my career, not because there is one right path for me, but precisely because there are so many. I needed a story to build on, not so that I can reassure myself that I chose the right path, but so that I can confidently explore the possibilities in my present and future. I needed a story that would help me become.
I started by trying on different ways of telling my story. Examining life events and questioning the meaning I took from them. Refactoring experiences and lessons learned. Seeing what it felt like to emphasize or deemphasize different narrative arcs. Examining my motivations and desires. Deconstructing my octopus limbs and their anxious, conflicting needs.
It felt uncomfortable, and my brain went into overdrive. It felt exciting, and life suddenly seemed full of possibilities. It felt scary, and my practical octopus limb was screaming, “whatever you do, don’t lose your health insurance!”
Act 3: The Story Never Ends
“Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” — Angela Duckworth
Around the same time that I found the metaphor about the octopus, I was reading Grit, a book about the psychology of perseverance and passion by Angela Duckworth. Her research is a gospel of hope, scientifically based on the conclusion that effort counts twice as much as talent when it comes to achievement. In other words, talent can be a factor in achievement, but it’s not the primary reason for it.
One of Duckworth’s frameworks really hit home with me. She writes about how gritty people all have goal hierarchies —1 or 2 top-level goals along with a map of mid- and low-level goals that support them. This allows them to visualize the particular path to the top-level goal and cultivate the stamina to stay focused on the path.
I mapped out a goal hierarchy last spring. It’s a work in progress, and some parts of it are fuzzy still or subject to change. But this practice gave me the clarity and courage to pull myself off a meandering path that felt inevitable and discover a new method of pathfinding — one that is purposeful and fulfilling to me.
Now, I’m almost halfway through a 1-year masters program focused on UX design at CMCI Studio. I love what I’m doing. I’m challenged every day. And the design philosophy I’m learning here echoes what I’ve been learning on my personal journey:
There is no right answer. Dig into the problem, understand the user, become familiar with the constraints. Then ideate, tell a story and see if it resonates. If it doesn’t, tell another story. Start designing a solution and never stop checking in — does this still resonate? — so you can fuel endless iterations. Always strive for better.
tl;dr I didn’t know what I was doing with my life and felt pretty bummed, then I read an article and a book that helped me change the way I thought about my career path. No self-help BS, just learning to own my decisions and put in the hard work. I still am trying to figure it out, but I know there’s no “right” answer. What I do know: I’m happier, more focused, and UX design is my jam. 😅
