Thursday, April 10, 2008

Ad School Is Not Really School

I had an interesting revelation last night, thinking about Honda Generators in one of those crazy dazes between awakeness and sleep. When all the best ideas finally poke their heads out like scared squirrels, amidst the cruel reality that you’ll most likely forget them when you finally drift off.

But this much I remembered.

There seems to be a trend here for the students to believe that this school is like regular school. I’ve fallen victim to that as well. It seems that we sometimes think of it as a place where you just have to get through and appease the professors like most of us did in undergrad, and, every now and then, we’ll have something cool to drop into our books.

But the truth is, it’s not. It’s an opportunity. And so is every single assignment.

We’re paying for the opportunity to come up with real solutions for real brands in a fake environment, and if we work hard and actually do a good job, it's something that we’ll be paid money for within 2 years, when the environment is very real.

I once saw in someone’s internship minibook (about working at their summer internship agency): “Itʼs a bit like winning the lottery only to find that you havenʼt won a check for a million dollars. Instead, what youʼve won is the chance to earn that million dollars for yourself.”

Well put.

dubs. out.

2 comments:

Kris Kennedy said...

I too have come to this realization in the past couple of weeks. I couldn't agree more. Congrats on all the success bud!

cbass said...

these two years you have are the time to make the shit YOU want to make. the stuff that excites you. the stuff that makes you want to get up in the morning and work well into the night. if you stay true to that, your book will be about you. and one day someone will hire YOU not because your book looks like every other polished ad book out there but because it has personality. at the end of the day it seems like agencies are hiring a person, not a student book.