Dropped out but trying to get back in

You got to work with Stephen Hawking and CERN? Now I’m seriously impressed and more than a little envious. I was a physics major until I switched over to graphic design for reasons I’ve never been able to adequately explain to myself. It’s still a huge interest of mine.

There are practical reasons, like lack of money and that sort of thing, but in general I wholeheartedly agree.

At jobs where I was the creative/design director, I probably conducted several hundred interviews with design applicants. Over time, my interview questions changed from the standard routine asking about their work to broader, more open-ended questions about what interested them.

By the time I interviewed people, I already knew if they had the skills and talent we needed. Twenty seconds spent quickly scanning a portfolio will provide the answers to 80-some percent of those kinds of questions.

By the time I interviewed someone, I already knew they had the design talent, so there was really no point in pursuing that for the entire interview. Instead, I found it more valuable to ask them about the latest book they read or what kept them awake at night when they couldn’t sleep.

The goal wasn’t to find out more about those particular things but was, instead, an attempt to peak behind the curtain at their general curiosity about the world around them. I remember talking to one applicant about his fascination with the rodeo circuit — he loved it. I talked to another person about how he spent two years in Rwanda in the Peace Corps.

Being a great designer was a prerequisite — without that, these people generally didn’t make it into the interview to begin with. However, getting the job required more than that. It required someone with critical thinking skills, broad interests, personal passions, depth and a genuine curiosity and fascination with many different things.

These traits needed to be balanced, of course, but I found that someone with a well-rounded education whose personality would never permit them to stop learning and soaking up knowledge from every possible direction invariably outshined someone whose design work was just as superficially good but who lacked the depth and breadth needed to go beyond mere competence.

Someone (I don’t know who) once said, “Hire the attitude. Train the skills.”

A little off-topic, but food for thought nonetheless.

What I mean is that in school and college you only learn things in order to pass a test and then after that test you forget-kind of like regurgitation. I have nothing particularly against math it’s just that I think it’s important to learn math or algebra in a way you can apply it to your major or a specific project you’re doing. Just doing a bunch of equations on a worksheet isn’t really going to get you anywhere. This has just been my experience with school (and probably for many others) and I always found it boring and soul crushing.

Welcome to the real world.

Regrettably, I do remember that the other students in my class were very cultured and had knowledge on diverse things. Yeah I really don’t have a passion for learning for the sake of learning-only on things that directly affect my life.