As we walked in on our final day, there was definitely a feeling of sadness and nerves for Sadie and me. We'd really started feeling at home at this agency, recognising people, knowing people's names... being recognised and smiled at as we walked past. These are all things we normally take for granted, but the fact that these were all professionals we were trying to impress over such a short time was a good sign.
We went around all the people we worked with over our time here and thanked them personally for the time we took up, also asking them for their e-mail addresses for future contact, and each and every one of them told us to keep in touch and that they would be more than happy to give us feedback on anything we send them. This will be incredibly useful in my practice... and correspondence will help me with future placements, I am going to try and keep a constant flow of emails going, so they remember who I am.
I was most sad when we went down to say goodbye to Richard and Remco, who had been so good to us in the first week, who took time out of their busy days to give us briefs, to catch up and give us feedback and to organise all sorts of meetings to get our ideas into reality. They seemed genuinely impressed with our progress over the two weeks saying "I hope you come back here, you're really cool and you've really got 'it'" and then telling us that our ideas will be going to the clients next week and they will let us know how it goes.
For Natalie, the creative services director who organised the whole thing, we bought a huge orchid to put on her desk... we decided to do this rather than a bouquet as she can keep it... and subsequently remember us whenever she looks at it. She then told me that I could come back in the summer because we had done so well. THEY WANT ME BACK FOR THE SUMMER FOR A LONGER SPELL OF WORK EXPERIENCE!!!! We are going to organise this formally in the next week or so. She also said that she had received brilliant feedback from everyone who had worked with us and that they were all very impressed with us.
Safe to say, we left with a glow.
I am so happy I did this. I now have a much better idea of what kind of career I would like to pursue. I very much enjoyed the conceptual part of the placement. Coming up with ideas. And it seems I am actually rather good at it, this gave Natalie a much better idea of what I would like to do in the summer.
I have also come out of this a much more rounded designer, with a lot more focus on what I want to achieve out of the course. There is a finish line and I am now so focused on getting there, that hard work is the answer. I was feeling a bit disenheartened in parts of last term... really not feeling any direction coming out of the work I was producing. A little lost you might say. I have not had one day on this 'break' where I haven't worked, both for the agency and for the course. I am genuinely happy with how much more focused and excited I am about it all now. I have the world ahead of me and this has been a brilliant boost. I have a completely new outlook. I really needed it.
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