A Product of Art School on Getting Into Product: A RISD Grad’s Advice for Job Hunting

Sarah Lin

I’m now seven months into my job at Yammer and almost a year out from when my friends and I began the torturous process of preparing our portfolios for job interviews. I look back now on that last semester with a newfound fondness at the ways we spent our sleepless nights: slaving over pixels, agonizing, wondering, “What do interviewers want to see?” For the design students out there who are just now beginning that arduous but exciting journey (or for those who soon will), these are the lessons I’ve learned since reaching the other side:

1. Don’t waste your time creating “real world” pieces. When I was at RISD, there was widespread concern amongst my peers that our fine-arts-driven pieces weren’t “portfolio ready.” Now that I’m on the other side of the wall, let me tell you: design for yourself while you’re in school. While having pieces related to the field you’re interested in is important, they’ll only serve to be detrimental if they don’t showcase you at your best. We want to see your chops in the mediums you excel in. Most importantly, create work that matters to you, because those are the pieces that will speak to your personality, your interests, and what you can bring to the company.
2. Process matters. Your professors were right! Those oft-detested process books our professors had us create, the unintended afterthought to the project: those are the indications that a designer is considerate about the details. Write, write, write about your decisions, and explain how you reached your conclusions. Take photographs of your pieces from beginning to end. As your potential future co-workers, we don’t need to see everything, but we need to know there’s something there. If nothing else, be prepared to talk about your designs intelligently. Design is more than just visual; it’s about problem solving, and we want to know you based your decisions on more than just gut instinct.
3. What you do is not unique, but how you do it is. Out in the wild (and especially in San Francisco), not only can everyone code, design, and analyze, but they’re better at it than you are. Try your hand at developing if you’re a designer or designing if you’re a developer, because empathy for not only the user but the people you’re working with is key. While I learned to hone my personal craft in school, once at work I quickly learned to view developers, researchers, and managers as my co-collaborators, not the enemy. Be kind, empathetic, and flexible, because how you approach people is just as important as how you approach your work.

Going from school to work is an adjustment on many levels: your designs have to be driven by more than personal preference, you have to learn to work with others, and you have responsibilities to people other than yourself. A year ago, I had no clue where I’d end up, but I’ve been lucky enough to find a position that challenges me daily and, best of all, allows me to work with people I genuinely enjoy spending time with. To the weary senior, don’t worry: you’ll soon cross that threshold, and when you do, there’s a lot more sleep here on the other side.

Sarah Lin is a UI Designer at Yammer. She recently returned to RISD’s campus to relive old times, give some talks, and recruit some of those selfsame weary seniors.