It's been a while...mainly because I've been busy graduating, having a relaxing holiday in Italy and doing placements. Today was the first day of the D&AD Graduate Academy on which I won a place for my Best New Blood Award. It's a week long program organised for 100 students by D&AD to help us break into industry, the top 50 graduates at the end will be rewarded with an internship.
Darius and Andrew from The Spring Project lead us through a series of exercises throughout the day to improve our confidence by examining ourselves and looking at why we are brilliant and why others should care. By lunchtime I already felt more confident which helped with our lunchtime brief - to ask the public why they are brilliant and to commit an act of generosity.
After lunch we considered how we could be brilliant when we are doing internships and how confidence could help us be outstanding. We concluded that we needed to be indispensable and in order to do this we needed to spot opportunities to help people when they arise and always go above and beyond the commitments and promises we make. We also defined brilliance as 'bringing out the best in yourself more often'.
The last part of the workshop was spent in groups admitting to what we were pretending (e.g. I'm pretending to be more confident than I really am), highlighting to ourselves that we pretend to be things that we are not in order to please people. This is in fact a waste of time and we should really be straight with people and concentrate on what we need to achieve with that person rather than wasting energy pretending to be something we're not. In the final exercise we wrote down two things we appreciated about each person in the group and gave these to them which was a really nice end to the session and made everyone feel good about themselves.
The exercises were incredibly helpful, rewarding, encouraging and I couldn't have asked for a better or more appropriate experience at this point in my design career, when I really feel that I need that extra bit of confidence. It was also very refreshing to develop a part of myself which is not creative but still relevant. Andrew and Darius are fantastic trainers and I'm going to try and use the skills they have taught me in my own daily life, especially during my upcoming placements so that I can really make the most of my opportunities and show employers why
I'm brilliant.
Bring on Day 2!
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