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.