Things College Failed to Teach Me

A compendium of my grievances against university in its failure to prepare me for the real world.

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Apparently popcorn has to spin to cook properly, and it is possible to burn it and the bag at the same time...

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Taxes. Why do I have to pay the government money for working. This sounds suspiciously like tuition >.>

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Couponing is a must.

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That there is no grown-up food. You will still be eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with fruit roll-ups out of the same lunch bag once you become an adult, well, if you want to actually have money to live on instead of eating out every day.

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Food costs a lot of money D:

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

That you will have to work with people who don't use the correct color profiles, and you'll have to spend hours trying to match colors >:[

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

That you should know your limits. If you are staring at the computer and not getting anything done, I believe it's time for bed and a fresh start in the morning. All uni taught me was to power though everything, forget sleep and quality, and finish all homework without a clear mind. Yeah, sounds like a great plan for when I'm doing real stuff.

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Something college actually prepared me for that it said I would never use: French. It actually helps when translating documents to have taken 2.5 years of French. Who knew?

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That you will ultimately find that the empty office next to you is being rented by an old man. Farewell glorious solitude and ability to play loud music :(

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Symbolism in design! I can't even count the number of times I've had to do research on symbolism for logos. The art half of me never touched on it; the English side did a little, but not how it worked into art, just writing.

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

Some days you will come home and pass out for no reason at all, even if all you did was sit in a chair for over eight hours straight.

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Fancy shoes will work your butt off. I think I used more muscles walking today than I ever have in just tennis shoes or flip flops. In college, I really didn't have the time or patience to bother with nice shoes, especially since I had to run from one end of campus to the other some semesters.

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That you will spend a wondrous amount of time doing design research to make authentic designs. It is super fun getting paid to search the internet for inspiration and reference photos. There should be a compendium of all these amazing resources for easy reference though, because a lot of time is spent on google trying to track down one image...

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

How to sketch correctly. I'm the worst when it comes to idea sketches. Just recently, I've been pretty much forced to do some pre-sketches before doing designs. Only one of my teachers forced us to do sketches, but they didn't do anything for me. I'm finding that it's a whole lot easier to get the lines of action and motion down and the general idea through a sketch first.

Most times, I really don't know what I'm going to illustrate or design, but when I'm doing something specific, sketches are extremely helpful.

[thingscollegefailedtoteachme]

That free gold leafing stocks are amazingly simple to find, while other stocks, such as wood, are incredibly hard. What is up with this?

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That uncreative office-y people are really quite boring. Also, I'm convinced that they're all robots.

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I'm actually surprised at this one: design history. Granted, I wasn't an art major, but I believe the art history classes dealt more with the fancy old art, rather than actual graphic design. In my typography class, we covered a brief overview of the history of typography, because it wasn't a history class but a lab class. But I would've liked to take an overall history of graphic design and typography class.

-sigh- I don't think even graduate school has all these fun classes I want to take...