College spreads your wings and then shoves you out of the nest into the working-world. You think you’re ready, so you enthusiastically pump your fists into the air, hum “I believe I can fly!”, and plummet towards the ground of the professional world. When you jump, you actually DO believe that you can fly. This belief, that spending your years at the university will make you a professional and an expert, started from day-one of your college education. It takes that entire time spent in a design education to get you to believe that this formulaic time spent in this system will make you real-world ready.

Universities tricks you with a few methods, but mainly with a leveling-up style of an education process. Like a video game, each year spent, levels you up for the final boss-level, where upon completion of that, earns you a medal. First year is a foundation and an introduction to the basics, once you pass that year, you’re onto a slightly more advanced topic, like research methods and concept development. As you level-up, you end up in your “final” year, the last level, where you’re ready for your senior projects and thesis. This final level signifies to you, there is nothing else to be learned, we have taught you everything you need to know, and here is your very expensive piece of paper. You believe this because they TELL you. They tell you, you are done, you have completed everything.

There’s a reason they have to get you to believe that four years is enough. The reason is so you shell out the $$$ and attend the school. Let’s say a movie didn’t promise you a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they only promised you the beginning. They’d have a lot harder time bringing people into the theaters. So universities promise you those three parts. The reality is, college is just the beginning. The first year isn’t the foundation, the entire four years is the foundation of your career. If you don’t realize that, this could lead to a few assumptions that could slow your development when you enter the professional world:

Don’t believe that: Classes in school were enough and that the learning can stop
You were given readings and articles on perspectives other than your own. No one pressures you to do so in the real world. You don’t HAVE to read any more design books, you don’t HAVE to experiment with new projects, you don’t HAVE to try methods that make you uncomfortable. You only have to read blogs that YOU like. But you should continue to read the other boring but important stuff and you should give yourself homework once in a while because your education isn’t done yet.

Don’t believe that: Your school projects is like real world projects.
Some school assignments include applied ethnography or a design survey. The budget is usually something around $0 to a $1000. I thought I knew what “design research” was until a handful of $400,000 quantitative studies and ethnography studies in multiple countries for $300,000 taught me otherwise. I’m not saying money buys you a quality report, because I’ve seen a good number of shitty ones, but I’m just sharing the scale difference between academic projects and real world projects. You may have learned the basic concept of a methodology, but keep your mind to how the application works.

Don’t believe that: Networking is important.
I’ve met a number of people who stopped learning and practicing and just concentrated on networking to get a job. They believe this because that’s what the professionals and teachers say to do. Networking is important and works well when you’re getting to know your peers at the same place in your careers. You can talk about similar interests and issues. Which means that when you’re starting out, your peers aren’t the ones doing the hiring, and the ones who are, don’t want to connect with you. Spend time on increasing what you can do and not rubbing elbows. It’s not who you know, it’s what you know.

Don’t believe that: Your final senior project is everything you know about design
Senior projects are done after three years of education under your belt. Which means that it’s not an accurate representation of what you actually learned in college. It’s actually a culmination of everything you’ve learned up to the end of junior year, put into application and explored. If you want a project piece in your hands to see what you’re truly capable of with your degree, do a project between your graduation and before you start your professional time. At the earliest, your final project should be done AFTER you graduate.

Dont believe that: Your graduation portfolio represents who you are as a designer.
It doesn’t and it shouldn’t. It’d be a shame to define what you want to do with design in the first four years in the field. There’s so much great aspects of design to explore. You should experiment for the next six. Keep searching for what you want to do and craft your body of work (every month or so) for the next few years after you graduate.