Reflections and Where I Am at the Moment

Now this is what I’m talking about:http://tarng.com/ 

Not only is he doing what I want to do, he’s good at it. And he’s about my age! (And he’s cute!)  I’ll be damned if I don’t catch up in a couple of years. 

There are some lessons to be learned from Julius Tarng:

1. Making the right choices early can mean a lot in the kinds of opportunities you get. 
2. It’s not enough to observe designed things; writing these observations down, taking photos of them and sharing them are important parts of the learning process.
3. I need to practice more, clearly.
4. Showcasing design is not just about putting a bunch of pretty pictures together; storytelling tools – storyboards, videos, even comics – can make a difference.
5. Good photographs and documentation can make a difference.
6. Tufts is short on design studio classes, unfortunately. I should look for opportunities elsewhere – in summer school, a job, or a graduate program – to build up my portfolio
7. Good website design is another way to showcase your design chops. Too bad WordPress charges $$$ if I want to use custom CSS.

Part of me wished I had gone ahead and done Industrial Design in Singapore instead of choosing the liberal arts route. (And look at me now! I’m in engineering – so much for that!) But I’m glad to be in the US – yes, Asia is really booming now and everything, but a lot of the cutting edge stuff is taking place here in the States. Or so I feel, anyway! 

In the past few days I was rather down on myself; there are still so many classes I want to take like ME1 (Mechanical Design and Fabrication), ES10 (Material Science), Architectural Studies, Illustration, Perspective Drawing etc, and so many damned statistics classes I must take instead. It feels even worse when I know I spent my underclassmen years taking classes that I wasn’t terribly passionate about. They were interesting, but I do regret some of them now.

Well! I have decided: I’m going to apply to all the internships I can find, kick ass, do bloody well in my required classes, learn tons, go the extra mile and all that, fit in a couple of the classes I want to take on top of them, and hopefully do a senior thesis involving design with intent and environmental sustainability. Then I’ll get a job for a year on my OPT, get a Masters in ID or Product Design or something related, get another job, do cool shit for the rest of my life. Have babies somewhere along the way.

Damnit, I can do this shit.  

Oh and by the way, I did manage to get an internship at Blue State Digital for this spring! I’ll be doing wireframes and talking to and learning about how to sell designs within and without an organization and how to collaborate with people from different technical backgrounds and how to make friends over office chatrooms and all sorts of things, I imagine. My supervisor is really cool (heck, everyone is really cool) and I can make inappropriate jokes nearly all the time, apparently. I’ll post more as time goes by – I really should.