Discovering Design Careers

While I continue to work on some more original content I must share this great information I find across the Internet with you.

Why couldn’t things just be easy? What feels like forever ago, I graduated high school with high hopes for my academic future. I knew I was interested in computers, but nothing more specific than that. When it came to college, all I knew was that I wanted to stay local to keep things simple as my life grew more complex. I had always excelled at science, mathematics, and computers, so I chose a technical degree. No one with respect for their career chooses a major in art, right?

Yet I knew that in the back of my mind, I liked art as well. Nothing major. I never took any formal art classes or anything. But even still, my artistic nature stuck out. On CS projects, I was the interface guru. Semester after semester, I would be the guy who would draw out interactions and plan the user experience. It’s not that I felt that I wasn’t contributing, I just felt like I didn’t get it. Why were we made to learn about relational databases, machine code, and graph theory? Was computer science not for me?

I felt disillusioned. I went to the school counselor for guidance and took a number of personality tests. I took job-preparedness tests. I visited our school’s co-operative education department. The results that came back confirmed my fears. I wasn’t meant to be a programmer. In fact, the results said that I would have the most pleasure being a singer or a performer. An actor or a teacher. A photographer or an archaeologist. Anyone who works outside or with people on a technical level. Worst of all, it told me to avoid office (especially their politics) and cubicles.

So I broke down and bought a camera. I joined local artist groups on campus. I changed my major to discrete mathematics. Math was the most philosophical degree I could get without choosing something I felt was a “soft” science. I really didn’t know what to do. I read a lot of books outside of class. I read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I knew that my dream career was out there. There had to be some job where my technical skill set and my design sensibilities could coalesce.

Read the rest of Andrew Maier’s experience.

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