What You Discover After Finishing Design School

I went to design school, and if you did as well, you may be wondering if you made the right decision, especially when the bills start piling up and the debts keep pouring in. It is important to invest in an education but in truth, design school does relatively little to prepare you for the working world in the cutthroat design industry (actually almost all industries are cutthroat – it is a competitive world out there). via denmark.dk What you learn in school may have taken years to master, but at the end of the day, it contributes only a small part to your "real design education". In reality, the things you will learn out of school will dwarf anything you learned in school. But you will eventually realize that upon leaving school, along with a few other things, which include:

1. Design School Only Teaches You How To Learn

You don't go to design school to actually learn how to do a job. That's right: you're not learning the things you really need in order to have a successful career, or even how to figure out how to get your foot in the door for an entry-level job. Sure, you learn the basics of design, but that's usually not enough to ensure that you can perform whatever tasks you will be asked to do by clients or art directors. Design schools are not at fault though. It's hard to cut 10 different designs from the same cloth unless you have the specifics in mind on how to make each cut. Until you know what sort of career you want to have, no amount of schooling will be able to help prepare you for it. So far, in school, you basically learn how to learn and even then the problems are pretty textbook and predictable, hardly a good representation on how things work in real life, which brings us to…

2. On The Jo [...]