My internship company is New York Artwing. It’s a fashion photography agency, but they are now trying to make another company called Big production. I was curious then I asked supervisor that why you need to have another company. He explained to me but honestly I don’t understand exactly. Basically clients come to Artwing to take photo shoots. They need everything including photographer. However, some clients have their own photographer. They need just studio, models, makeup or props. Big production is for that people. That is why Artwing need another company.

The supervisor asked me logo design before I work on web design. He wants to look like old fashion typewriter style and logo should include “big, production and events” words.

Now I’m doing some sketches. Hopefully it comes out beautifully.

Seventh Entry: October 14^th

I’ve taken the time to dissect the inner marking of “Social Animal” by David Brooks, as discussed in the New Yorker. His article’s subtitle reads, “How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.” After completing the article, and glancing back at that subtitle it aids you in summing up the experience of the human unconsciousness and how powerful it is. Success is largely dependent on how deeply others can relate to you. Emotional ties, social interaction and common relations of the norms are crucial in developing individuals for a success.

“If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people”

In the article we are given two people, Harold and Erica throughout their youth, adolescence, career choices, marriage, and retirement. Both Harold and Erica were created to show every aspect of the “Social Animal”, including education, socialization, and morality. They have roller-coaster of lessons in their experiences. Through it all, both learn to adapt and grow as individuals as even as a couple. They both achieve success in their fields by imitating the philosophies set forth by Mr. Brooks. His attempt is to make us more aware of the subconscious perceptions others may have of us, so that we may utilize it to our advantage. To embrace all ties we have to our circumstances, to help shape the greatness in our lives.

It was an exhausting-ly in-depth, yet fascinating read. Unfortunately, due to issues in scheduling at work, I had to cover today’s Wednesday shift missing our 7th class meeting, but I was sure to post the necessary entries to the site.

As mentioned on My First Blog Entry for September 8th, after finally finding the correct OpenLab Internship site, I’ve transferred  ALL of the Blogs I had been working on so from the last few weeks into this Course Profile.

Previously I was a part of an identical site for the Fall 2015 Semester under Professor Joel Mason and “tgoetz” (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/comd-4900-communication-design-internship-fall-2015/). Wilson, Huseyin, and I had been the only members of this particular profile, but then found it alarming that I had been the only individual providing entries. Luckily my investigation led me to this here, which is better late than never, I presume.

Alright, so a friend of mine posted this article on Facebook a while ago (Link Below), and I figured I’d write about it because it’s pretty relevant. The article was written by a woman working in the design field who moved with her family to Switzerland for a while, and then returned to the US. There she experienced huge differences in Work/Life balance between the two countries.

I don’t want to give away too much of the article cause it’s a pretty good read, but one of the things that stuck out to me is that in Switzerland, Part-time jobs retain EVERY benefit of Full-time jobs including vacation time and pension plans. The way the system there works,  full-time work is considered 100% but you’re free to choose how much of a percentage you want to work. You could work 60%….50%…20% without being made to feel guilty.

“During my Swiss career, I was employed by various companies from 25 percent to 100 percent. When I worked 60 percent, for example, I worked three days a week. A job that is 50 percent could mean the employee works five mornings a week or, as I once did, two and a half days a week. The freedom to choose the amount of work that was right for me at varying points of my life was wonderful and kept me engaged and happy.”

Overall, what makes this article amazing to me is the fact that she’s working in Ad Agencies over there. Professors have told me that to work as a Designer here in America, you don’t go home until the jobs finished. I’ve been told and heard the stories of people sleeping underneath their desks, pulling all nighters just to meet the clients deadlines. So to think there’s place on earth where you , as a designer can work and have amazing freedom and energy..well… damn. I don’t know about ya’ll , but I know where I’m moving to.

“Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture” by Chantal Panozzo

Okay so I’m a couple weeks into working here; the security guards know my face (for being here every other day..….I swear.), I’m falling into the routine e.t.c and I’m beginning to notice a bit of an issue, one that I’ve spoke with Professor Chen about. For some weird reason there is a shortage of up-to-date design capable computers in the In house design studio.

Here’s where the problem comes in, let’s say the office has 10 desks. Now we share office space with the administrative side of City Tech so let’s say of those 10 desks, 4 are Macs with design programs. Of those 4 Macs, two are actually up to date, running the latest versions of the Adobe suite. The other two are fit for a MOMA Exhibit on computers from the late 90’s. One of the two only runs Phototshop CS1 while the other has Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign CS4.

There are at least 5 design interns working here, myself included. Warranted were not necessarily all in at the same time, but there are times when there’s just not enough computers to work on; and that’s crazy, especially when you consider that City Tech replaced every single Mac computer in the Namm & Voorhees building despite them still being in good condition. What did they do with them?, you would think they would have sent 2 or 3 over to their in- house design studio.

I find it quite weird that interns always have to bring a laptop or else they can’t work at their own internship. It’s annoying that I literally ended up having to leave after 30 minutes one day because there were no computers available that were up to date enough to be compatible with my files or my wacom tablet.

I’ve talked this over with Professor Chen to see if maybe we could track down some of the previous Macs the school used to have, and install them in the office; but he told me he’s been trying to get those for a while now, but kept running into walls.  City Tech’s In-house design studio, the office City Tech forgot.

College degrees have been considered ‘meal tickets’ in society for as long as there were higher learning institutions, so much so that the idea of degrees becoming ‘obsolete’ is a bit of a culture shock. ‘Get a Degree= Guaranteed Job’ is the belief still held by a lot of people today. It’s an idea that was fed by corporations who used to deny people employment solely based on their lack of a thinly sliced, polished tree carcass; regardless if they actually possessed the skills to do the job.  So is it a surprise that it’s begun to blow up in their face by producing a generation of college graduates who were more focused on getting the degree rather than honing the skills required to do the job?

The article “How to Get a Job” by Thomas L. Friedman describes how companies are becoming less interested in the degrees a candidate has and more interested on who has the skills to do the job. “A degree document is no longer a proxy for the competency employers need.”  It never should have been in the first place, yet that’s how they made it. Whether they intended to or not, they made it so that the degree became more important than the skills required to do the job.  Maybe it was easier—- quicker to look on a resume and see “Bachelor’s of ———” and use that rather than sitting down to discern the skills of each individual candidate. Either way, I guess it’s a good thing for them to start looking more at the candidate’s skills vs. credentials; yet I wonder if this means that they’d give Mark, the high-school dropout with an uncanny business sense a chance.

So my first day working in City Tech’s Design office was okay I guess. I got the internship from Professor Chen who was sitting in my 3D modeling class on the first day. He asked at the beginning of class if anyone was interested in applying for a fall internship, mentioned his design studio needed interns and that all modules were welcome. He didn’t mention it was the schools in-house design studio specifically, but hey…I’m not mad.

The office itself is generally quiet. I have my own office to work in and I sit draw for 6 hours with my headphones on. That’s basically my intern experience so far; my pulse pounding, edge-of your-seat, exciting badass internship. On my first day, Professor Chen gave me the option to either work on school related projects or work on his personal projects. I chose (STUPIDLY) to work on the school projects, and as a result was bored to tears.

Basically the school has an instagram account that nobody follows, like seriously the school president could post pictures of himself embezzling money; pictures with him on yachts and stuff with wads of cash and a caption reading “Here’s your 2015 tuition!! Hahaha!! Ya’ll can’t stop me!”#thuglife ; and nobody would know.

All jokes aside, the first task I was given was to do a portrait of these tech students who got internships with top companies; something nice that would look great on instagram. I was only given one very tiny image of the five of them with no other reference material, so rendering exact likeness was next to impossible. On top of that, it seemed like every composition I came up with was canned due to how I placed the figures.

“This Person should be in front of that one because he did the most work with this program….. that person got this award and needs to have a swirling halo around their head”; I wasn’t okay with placing people differently in the composition according to how inflated their ego was; I felt the bottom line was that they all were being honored, therefore they all should have been represented equally in the image, not hierarchically by who did what.

Ultimately I ended up dropping the project in favor of working on Professor Chen’s personal work which is more varied and interesting, and I’m not required to visually coddle egos.

It’s October 13 and today is another day at City Tech Image and Visual Communications. I’m getting better at masking out photos. The City Tech Wi-Fi logo, I’ve been working on has been a challenge but, the project has given me the chance to work with typography and shape. It’s something I haven’t done for a while now.

I got to my internship late today; I was there at 11 a.m. because my transportation Access-A-Ride dropped me off late. The driver made several pickups, before he dropped me off. I got to my desk and Mr. Vargas came to my desk, to find out, where I’m at with my work progress. I had to finish, masking out the background of the last Hospitality Management department photo. There were two photos; both of them were photos of Hospitality Management students, dressed as chefs with their Professors. Afterwards, I grouped the two Hospitality Management department photos.

For one of the photos; I had to change its brightness and contrast. This way both photos brightness and contrast would match. About an hour later, Mr. Vargas came by my desk and told me to feather one of Professors head a little more. Once I was done; I went back to work on the City Tech Wi-Fi logo. I played around with the letters of the word Wi-Fi and, I fitted all of them into the Wi-Fi symbol. I stretched and thickened the letters so, they could properly fit.

By, the end of the day; I had completed all my work. Next week a new project and challenge awaits me. I am prepared for the next challenge and experience!

October 13, 2015
I am reading an article written by Jonah Lehrer titled “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth.” By the way, the pain behind my left eye still hadn’t gone away, so with that fact I had an enjoyable time reading that particular article (sarcasm). When this article began somehow I knew I wasn’t going to like the outcome. However, I continued reading hoping for a surprise and the only surprise that came up was that brainstorming usually didn’t work. And I understood why people thought it was a good idea and I understood why it failed. All brainstorming ever did was have people throw ideas at the wall with the underlying thinking of if you threw enough ideas, no matter the quality, you were bound to find one good idea out of the bunch.
Remember when I begun writing this blog how there was one aspect of this article I wasn’t going to like? It had to do with group work, I honestly do not like working in groups. I won’t deny that it can lead to creative ideas and works, but it’s not for me. I personally find that I do fine working by myself, I don’t like having to rely on someone else to pull their weight within a group. I have had some pretty bad group experiences in the past and it might have and I would like not to relive them again. However, as the article went on, I knew that that sort of thinking would have to change.

October 9, 2015,
Decided to write another journal entry because, why not? I’m still working on my print portfolio, I’m still compiling a list of internships I might qaulify for and I’m still freaking out about not finding one yet. I’ve been thinking of whether I should just forgo the portfolio and just call every internship I have found and then work on it in between. However, the perfectionist (is that what I should call it?) in me won’t allow me to do it until I finish my appointed task. This might end up being a problem.
Between having bouts of, “I hate this, I hate this, how can I expect to do good work if I hate this” feelings, (yeah, it is going to be one of those journal entries analyzing my mind) and getting a pain behind my left eyeball that just won’t go away. I’m still wondering if this type of work is suited for me. In either case, I trudged along like a good little soldier until I realized the date. It was around the time I begun writing this, it’s October 9th and I still don’t have an internship. Part of me is terrified and the other part is just going “meh”.
It was in September that I started reworking my portfolio, initially I already had it completed by with the march of time, there are things that must be updated. A portfolio is as much alive as your resume when you are a job seeker. Now it’s October and I’m almost halfway done and my general feeling to that is…Meh.

October 9, 2015,
So I finally got around to reading the article on The New Yorker titled, “Social Animal”. The first couple of paragraphs had me smiling, it almost felt like the author was poking fun at the “Composure Class” the author was writing about. That was until I got to the meat and potatoes of the article, the reason why it was written in the first place. The more I read of the article the more I got to understand what it was trying to convey with it’s story of Harold. Tangible accomplishments were all well in good, but the intangible accomplishments should not be left to the side. If anything nurturing the social aspects of your life regarding your friends and peers is also a great quality to have.
And once again it got me to think. When we leave college and begin working in the field of our choosing, it won’t only be our ability to finish a task on time that helps us to keep our job. It will be our ability to navigate the social settings of our workplace. Our ability to interact with our boss and colleagues can make or break us. I’ve heard stories of people who have lost their jobs, not because they did bad work, from what I’ve heard they did good work. The reason why they lost their jobs was due to their behavior among their colleagues. A while ago my psychology professor told the class about a woman who had an I.Q. of 195, yet she had trouble finding work due to her attitude towards people.
I guess sometimes it’s not always about your ability to do your job, but also how you interact with others.