Everybody asks me what it’s all about when I tell them that I work for Naked Creativity on placement. Usually I don’t have time to say more than a few words, so this article explains placements in detail, and how it benefits everyone to have a placement student around.
At Brunel, where I will be returning in September, you have the option in the design department to do your degree ’straight through’ in three years, or take your third year out and do a placement with a company, or spend a year studying at a partner university (San Francisco is a popular option). Then back for the fourth and final year.
The majority of people chose to do a placement year, because of the benefits that come with it. You get a year’s experience of how design works in the real world, finding out what is important. Suddenly there are these wonderful things called ‘evenings’ and ‘weekends’, and it takes a couple of months to understand this mythical creature called ‘free time’. You learn to properly manage your time and estimate how long a project will take. You get to see your work function in the real world, where it actually matters. The hours are better, the motivation is better, and the rewards are fantastic. Not to mention you get a year out from the stress of the course! It is a well known fact that students who have taken a year out on placement are calmer, more prepared, and tend to do better in their final year.
The first month of placement is the hardest. There is a lot to learn, and it takes a while to get used to regular hours, it’s the first thing you have to get through in the transition from ’student’ to ‘employee’. There is also an element of culture shock. At Brunel, I spent all day every day with other design students, talking about different grades of acrylic, DC vs Stepper Motors, embedding images in PDFs…
It is a whole world of jargon you don’t even realise you have slipped into until you are away from it. So its a challenge communicating with clients, trying to explain some of the jargon (such as what an EPS file is) to someone who quite rightly has never heard the term before.
Placements improve your confidence as they remind you how much you’ve learnt at university so far.
For this placement, I have been introduced to the world of website design and development. I’ve learnt programming languages, how to design a website, about search engine optimisation, back-end databases and a whole host of things that go into making a website. I can now judge pixel distances by eye, and write whole strings of code off the top of my head. Geeky? Probably. But tomorrow, I will be designing pages in a magazine. It’s a wonderful balance.
Having a placement student also benefits the company and the clients. You get a fresh brain with new ideas, and the existing employees know the clients, and where to use the ideas to maximum effect. It’s a win-win situation.
This year has been fantastic. I have had the chance to experience life in the working world, with the opportunities granted by the placement system, and I have loved every minute of it.
In the words of Boris Johnson, when asked how the water was after he famously fell in the river – a placement year is ‘very refreshing, and I thoroughly recommend it!’