Five Things Every Design Student Should Tell Themselves
When you have poured your heart and soul into a project and it gets shut down, when you worked for 6 hours straight and your computer crash, when you seem so lost that no idea seems to pan out, tell yourself... It’s okay. It’s okay that the world seems to be crashing around you. You can recover from this. You can do better. You can do this. You just need to breathe and start again.
2. ‘I am good at what I do.’
You won’t be here if you weren’t. Every time you feel like you don’t understand, that you start to doubt yourself, when you rethink whether a degree in design is the way forward, remember why you came here. Remember that spark...whether it was cutting up all your mother’s sarees or building houses for your dog... you ended up here for a reason. Find that person in you, and drag them out.
3. ‘All this is worth it.’This is when you think you are at the edge of a breakdown. You’ve pulled a few all nighters, have managed to drag yourself to class and stay awake, you’ve just finished your 350th sketch, and you are wondering whether you should just take a week to sleep and watch movies, remember that all that you do now is worth it at the end. When your mind started churning out world-changing ideas at every opportunity, when others’ lives change because of your work, and when you feel like the world is truly your oyster (but why oyster) it’s all...worth it.
4. ‘I’m doing this for myself; no one else can do it for me’
Sometimes, it can be hard to work when you can’t unload on someone you trust about what you are going through. Worse... if they don’t understand what you are going through. The degrees are tough. Remember you are too. As much as you want to run up to your parents or your ‘Person’ and cry about how stressed you are, that won’t always give you the solution. Then again, you don’t have time to cry about it too. As we said, it’s a tough degree. Take a minute to give yourself a pep talk. Think about why you are doing and for whom you are doing this for. This is one thing that you are doing by yourself for yourself, and you have to do it right. If it’s just you standing on this path, so be it. Believe you can get through this. Remember that you always have you. You have your mind to think, your hands to create, and your determination to work around obstacles. As long as you trust in yourself and believe in your capability to make it work, you will always have your back.
5. ‘I am proud of myself and my work.’
This is important. You should be proud of your work. When you start over and over, when you believe you can do this, when you truly have your own back, and when you see the end result, you should be amazed and proud of yourself. Your work should make you proud of your brain, your grit, and your ability to survive these three years of a design degree, because we all know that it’s not as easy as people claim it to be. In fact, it’s nowhere close to the word ‘easy’.
You got this. You can do this. You are okay. We are proud of you.
(All gifs by GIPHY)