Careers Guidance Talk

Last week I was asked to give a talk in a school about careers and the world of fashion/crafting. It was a little surreal to walk into a room of 20 or so 15 year old girls and talk about what I do, and it was only about 10 minutes before I had to start that I realised I had no idea what I was going to say! After I got past the first daunting minute it was actually pretty enjoyable. There was lots of questions; some strange, some pretty informed. It was odd to see myself in them 12 years ago with all these strange ideas of what the real world is like. Especially if any of them intend on working the the creative field.

I tried to explain that I've worked in many diciplines over the past 6 years since leaving college and that how nearly accidently I started this business a couple of years ago. I got one hilarious question asking if I got bored waiting around for it all to happen, like one day I clicked my fingers and I became a designer. What do you even say to that...? I just tried not to laugh and say that I was learning lots of different skills by working in different creative areas. Even including some of the off the wall questions like that I was really surprised to see how attentive they could be to a talk like that. Especially considering I tried to be as realistic as possible saying that it was pretty much no glamour and 24/7 work in working for yourself.

To be honest there are many times that I feel like I'm only 16 on the inside and that all of this is one big crazy accident, but giving that talk made me see how much life has changes in years since college, and especially since I was 15!! It's funny the ideas that we have of what we want to do when we are older. I was really lucky in that I realised very young I wanted to go to art college, but I had no concept of where that would bring me. In some ways deciding your career at 15 is totally insane, but I'm not sure what system could replace it.

Anyway I hope I didn't terrify the lovely girls too much, and that maybe a couple of them will think of going into a creative workplace.