Why you should never give up.

Lesson learnt during a pandemic crisis.

Swob culture will be a firm foundation of my journey professionally and personally after having performed each duty, by following up brand guidelines and suggestions in terms of content creation from my placement supervisors. I am confident to stress out that Swob culture has perfectly resembled my vision as a designer and my perspective as a recent graduate looking to kick off a career in the media and creative arts industry.

Similarly to this, there is no doubt that since my first interview, I have immediately felt being part of Swob, both internally, as a team member, and externally, on my daily duties as a design practitioner. It was mainly due to my team effort to openly communicate every week, without having to feel too much pressure on each assignment performed on my own. Throughout the placement and its journey as a creative, I opted to mark both Alexander and Stephanie entrepreneurship styles as coaching leaders. My evaluation derivers from the fact that a coaching leader should be someone who can quickly recognize positives, weaknesses, and motivations to support each individual. Having stressed this out, I do believe that both employers showed to promote my professional and personal growth thanks to challenging critiques and observations about my work since the first week. By setting smart goals and creating a positive and infectious atmosphere, the following working style had a decisive impact on providing a successful performance. However, compared to Stephanie, I would say that Alexander was even a servant coach, which was the result of a persistent attitude through following up questions and clarifications about my drafts or sketches. Additionally, he asked me if I was feeling personally and professionally fulfilled by my role as an intern. It is also important to reveal that these methods helped me to build up morale and to believe in my own decisions during the weekly reviews of my design executions.

I do believe that the last two semesters in the Advertising and Graphic Design program at Humber College were the most incredibly helpful when dealing with some of the placement tasks. However, it is also reasonable to point out that during May and June, I decided to keep learning new technical skills and mastering my design and creative thinking as well. Starting from such early commitment, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours a day working on refining my Creative Cloud software skills both theoretically and practically thanks to Lynda’s online resources and YouTube videos. Simultaneously, I found them extremely useful, especially when having to work with less busy design layouts on either Photoshop or Illustrator and restrictive brand-oriented colour swatches. Likely, some of the Typography classes tips from Semester 3 were particularly beneficial when dealing with multiple changes in terms of layout page formats or by switching from a 1080 x 1080 pixels to a 1080 x 1920 pixels. Most of the Media Technology 2 classes had a reasonable impact on the completion of my placement as well. In according to this, I worked on a promo 15 seconds video commercial for Swob through the last few days as an intern and, honestly, I would have never had the chance to achieve a 15 seconds commercial animation without the After Effects tutorials of the Media Technology 2 Friday morning classes. Accordingly, Presentation Skills tips in regards to the elevator speech and personal branding guidelines were both extremely essential towards the very first stages of the placement process. Mostly because I had to send over my resume and cover letter for hiring purposes, I found them crucial as a whole. If I have to be honest, I wished I had got a better head sigh over business principles combined with a broader foundation into file and project management as well, which might have been helpful. I also wished I had learned something more about them through webinars and workshops ahead of my placement.

Undoubtedly, I would highlight that compared to some communications challenges that I faced while working on many group projects, especially in my last semester, I felt more confident in applying a distinct communication style through video calls and following up emails. Therefore, I think that my communication skills have significantly improved over the last couple of weeks. Additionally, I am similarly convinced to embrace much more flexibility when working within a more collaborative environment such as an agency or communications studio in the next chapter of my journey as a creative. Working on my own during the placement allowed me to better cope with challenging tasks such as strict deadlines and overwhelming weekly content creation plans. Therefore, by individually tackling such responsibilities, I do believe that there is a lot to learn from such a unique opportunity for growth professionally and personally as well. However, I might be able to share my expertise for any next job opportunities thanks to the variety of my placement duties and the associated design work samples.

Additionally, I would point out that these seven weeks of placement will be singularly concerned as a starting reference point of my ideal working setting and environment in the future. By working with Alexander and Stephanie, I had the chance to fully visualize the striking difference between being in an academic environment and a real 360° workplace, although the work setting was remote.