Pro Pract — Culminating Post
Time flies! It feels like it was only yesterday when I write the summary post for Creative Founder, and now I am writing another one for Professional Practice!
In this course, I developed my professional skills in four main aspects: Know myself, share my work, connect with others and participate as a professional. In “know myself”, my objective was to find out my passion and favorite design practice. What I did was creating a personal purpose Venn diagram that helps me identify my skills and passions (and more importantly how I could use these to make changes to the society) and wrote a post about three of my favorite design methods. These two actions give me the opportunity to reflect on my work and passion as a designer. Now I feel more clear about what I care about generally and how I could approach design problems in the future.
In “share my work”, I got two learning objectives which I will continue to work on over the summer. For the objective of “rock the Junior Review”, I built a website that has 4 of my case studies, and received many insightful feedbacks from professional reviewers that will benefit my growth in the next phase. In the objective of “reach out to more audience”, I created a Twitter account in which I will post regularly to share my life as a growing designer, and developed intriguing narratives for 3 case studies. Another key result I am planning for is a vlog that document a day in my life as a design student. Since I am starting my internship at Tencent and there are lots of people (especially college students) who are curious about this experience, I am thinking about using the vlog to share my internship life instead.
My next learning goal is to “connect with others”. This is the part I consider myself not doing enough over the semester. In my objectives, “grow my network on Bēhance and LinkedIn”, I followed many designers on Bēhance as well as formed over 100 connections on LinkedIn, but I haven’t been really actively interacting with people. I realize that networking on these platform is a slow process. Even though I haven’t heard many responses yet, I am glad that at least I got the hardest part done — getting started!
My last learning goal is to “participate as a professional”, and this is divided into two specific objectives, get an internship and join the community. In this first half of the semester, getting an internship was really at the top of my mind. It was a stressful and anxious process, but luckily I got some nice offers and also become tougher in this experience of job seeking. In addition to that, I also attended several design events and shared my thoughts in the form of sketchnotes on LinkedIn. In one of the events, I even held a small follow-up session with my teammate to recap what we learn from the event. What’s more excited? I got accepted to two design groups on LinkedIn that are related to the field I am working on or interested in just yesterday!
I remember when I was registering for Creative Founder, a student from a previous cohort told me how our instructor, Kate, is really good at pushing the limits of her students, and one would grow tremendously from taking her class. This is very true in hindsight. In Professional Practice, I learn to discipline myself to make progress in a self-directed learning experience, and become more aware of my role in the community. What’s more, I also got a supportive cohort where we share resources, experience and tips with each other. Instead of competing, we help each other achieve our goals and celebrate our success. As a growing designer, now I feel more reassuring about my career choice and less anxious about what I will be facing when I enter the real world.