Who Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?
Taking an iterative approach to my career.
Looking back at my adolescent self, I can think of at least 5 different times I changed my mind on what I wanted to be ‘when I grew up.’ Mia Hamm, an archaeologist, a historian, a writer, and a fashion designer. Currently, I do none of these things (most upset about not being Mia Hamm).
In high school, I spent a lot of time worrying about what career path I would take. I was a perfectionist and over-achiever, so I put a lot of unnecessary stress on myself to pick the right path for myself. As you can see, my current interests up until that point were a little disconnected. As a 16 year old, I decided that I was going to be a fashion designer. I loved art — and I loved sketching fashion illustrations. So I went to a fashion summer camp and spent a week sketching, sewing and picking fabrics and loved it. That was it. I had picked my dream job. Future decided, no more worrying needed.
Wrong, of course. At 17, I decided my AP art project would be a fashion magazine since I was going to need to prove myself to get into a great fashion school. I drew dozens and dozens of croquis (fancy word for fashion sketches) and then realized I would need to get them onto the computer to actually turn them into a magazine.
Let me take a step back and say that growing up in a conservative, Catholic family, I also had a little bit of a skewed perception of what my options were. My parents were both college-educated (and then some) and put a lot of emphasis on our education. When I look back on what was suggested to me, it looked a little like: professor, teacher, nun, and if I showed enough promise, maybe a doctor. I’m pretty sure the base criteria was: please make enough money so that you don’t have to move back home — since there are 7 of us children total. I don’t recall ever being pressured to go any specific direction — but there were professions deemed not suitable for women, one of which seemed like technology.
My dad works in technology — he used to enter code with punch cards back in the day, has been a project manager for international tech companies, and totally geeks out over new gadgets. Growing up, this was one of the things we bonded over. I followed him around as he hooked up new TVs, computers, setting up dial up internet so I could absorb it all. I spent a lot of time on the computer figuring out what I could do with it. At one point in middle school I taught myself basic code so I could make a website for me and my classmates to secretly chat with the boys (gender-separated buildings) during computer class.
So 17 year old me was pretty comfortable with technology at this point. I just didn’t view it as a viable career option, nor had anyone ever told me I could choose that. I can’t really say it was a surprise when bringing my fashion sketches into the computer and creating the layouts became my favorite part of the project. My high school art teacher was the one who made graphic design feel like an option for the first time.
Of course, now I was going to be a graphic designer — just in time to apply for colleges. My parents’ thoughts on becoming a graphic designer was that it was related to art, and art, of course, is a “hobby” not a “career.” My mother lamented that I would be a starving artist and have to move home. They both assumed I would change my mind again if I was sent to a good enough liberal arts college. My parents’ were kind enough to offer to assist financially with college, but that assistance was under their terms. So instead of going off to a design school, I went off to a small, conservative, liberal arts college.
Once there, I thought about switching over to English because it felt like a safer move. My college offered a graphic design minor, but it was meant to be a supplement to business degrees, and not turn you into a full time graphic designer. But I declared as an art major anyways. I’m not sure if it was mostly out of defiance or naiveté, but I decided that I would just do whatever I could to make it happen and figure out how to get a job later.
I jumped through the hoops I needed to at a liberal arts school — I took introduction to the American Constitution, philosophy, and classic English literature, but I also took every art class I could fit in: sculpture, painting, sketching, photography, etc. I went straight to the head of the art department my freshman year and requested early access to art classes. In a lot of ways, going to a smaller school helped me make my own path, because they gave me a flexibility larger schools most likely couldn’t have.
Since higher level design classes were not available to me, I had to be creative about getting more graphic design experience. I took a receptionist job my sophomore year at a real estate office that was 80% answering phone calls, cleaning toilets and greeting guests, and 20% designing logos and editing videos. I volunteered for clubs around campus and designed flyers and posters for them. I joined a student run magazine and took over their design, and acted as design editor for the yearbook. At the end of my sophomore year, the college design office reached out to me and I got hired as the design intern under the Creative Director.
She took me under her wing and was the first person to genuinely show me what working as a graphic designer was like. That design and art can be very separate, and that it wasn’t always fun or even creative — sometimes it meant cutting 300 flyers by hand, or formatting the index of a 500 page course catalog. She also took risks on me, and let me design the graduation program for my own graduation ceremony. To this day, she is still my mentor and someone I look up to.
I continued to work as a graphic designer for the college until I graduated. My junior year I took an independent study with my design professor focused on web design. I regularly visited his office to get his critique on my work. I will admit, by mid junior year, I was starting to panic about being ready for a design job after I graduated. Had I done enough? Would I be too far behind people graduating from design schools?
As a last push — mostly out of stress about finding a job, I took a transient semester at an art school. The fall of my senior year, I spent the semester in Atlanta attending Savannah College of Art and Design. There I got to take highly specific design classes like typography and vector graphics. Attending a legitimate design school was both incredible and terrifying. Incredible in that I got to interact and be surrounded by likeminded people on a daily basis and witness their creativity. Terrifying in that it made me overwhelmed by everything I had missed out on and worried about what I didn’t know.
I entered my final semester and started seeking jobs. The career office on campus couldn’t help me because my college didn’t have any alumni working in design that they could connect me with. I attended the job fairs my college recommended, but they were focused on liberal arts based jobs and I left without prospects each time. Graduation came and went and I stayed on for the summer at the design office on campus because I didn’t want to move home. I knew at the end of the summer I would have to make a decision because my current job would no longer be available.
At the end of the summer, I packed up and moved across the country to Denver. I interviewed from afar, but found it very difficult to get interviews when you don’t live in-state, so I just bit the bullet and moved. Two weeks after moving, an old classmate called and mentioned their company had a graphic design job in Colorado open if I was open to moving there. The timing felt a little surreal, but I got my first official design job one week later, and have been working in design ever since. And if it’s worth anything, it hasn’t mattered to a single person I’ve interviewed with what school I went to, or whether I have an official graphic design degree rather than a concentration.
So I guess you could look back at that and say that I did it. I chose what I wanted to do and I’m doing it, and that’s that — I have my dream job. When in reality it’s not as cut and dry — I love graphic design, but the further I get into it, the more interested I’ve become in design strategy.
Now I’m enrolled in a master’s program in User Experience design, and I’m excited all over again at the thought of pursuing this new career path. I’m 5 months out from graduation, and still unsure of exactly what I want to do when I’m done. This worries me less than it did when I was entering college the first time. I’m convinced at this point that I’m probably never going to stop changing the idea of what I want to be when I “grow up.”
I’m still just as nervous about my future, but I’m less concerned about taking the exact “right” path to get there now. I feel like my undergraduate experience helped me realize that you can take a lot of different routes and still end up where you want to be — and that where I want to be is going to change a lot throughout my career.
