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.

     Hey, my name is Sekou and these are my experiences as an illustration intern at my school’s in house design studio. I figure there’s no need for this to be boring, so let’s have a some fun with this, shall we.

     Alright, so currently I’m interning at City Tech’s in house design studio on Court Street, Brooklyn; However before I get into that story, I figured i’d start from the beginning of my internship hunting experience via Glassdoor.com.

     So to make a long boring story short, I applied to a whole bunch of places and didn’t really get any callbacks. There specifically was a position for an Editorial Illustration intern at Mashable.com that I wanted to get; it was a paid internship and sounded like a great opportunity, which is why it probably had ten thousand applicants. But hey whatever right? No worries, stiff upper lip and soldier march to the back of the line and try again; just fill out more applications.

     Do you know what the BEST part of applying for internships online is? Sitting through crucibles of pervasive ‘Interview’ questions especially crafted to expose character flaws, test carpal tunnel susceptibility, and make mere mortals flee in terror.  Some of my personal favorites to answer are: “What are your greatest strengths/ weaknesses? , “Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?”, and my new personal favorite courtesy of mashable.com; “In 150 words or less, Describe what makes you unique?”. By the time I made it to that question, I was fighting the urge to write “HIRE ME AND FIND OUT!! MotherF*&%#!”.

Don’t worry, I didn’t actually put that on the application; I wrote something more along the lines of “Unfortunately, I have yet to gain the level of self awareness required to accurately answer such an introspective question; so instead, I will leave you with…I make amazing PB&J sandwiches.”  Still waiting on that reply email; if there is a correlation between sass and unemployment, I have found it.