Caution. This morning I had a wonderful lecture and I am about to go all fangirl for a few minutes. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Karoline Newman is the director of Articulate Communications, a company providing PR consultations which provides campaigns for arts events, aimed at the creative industry. Currently, I am in the middle of my Professional Practice module at uni, which offers guidance on the real world of work after we leave education. It’s a wonderful part of the course that makes you think realistically about what is asked of you once you start applying for jobs. But more importantly, we have incredible guest speakers who give incredible advice. Karoline Newman was today’s guest host.
And my, was she brilliant. As our course (and industry) is so fast-moving and is constantly updated, we are often left hearing generic university help we are already aware of and it can fall on deaf ears; becoming a little tedious. Yet Karoline’s enthusiastic, bubbly but truthful attitude caught our attention. After speaking to the other girls I feel I can speak for the group when I say that today, we weren’t just hearing, we were listening.
Finally, here is a woman who has really been through it, understands creative minds and (my favourite part) understands DMU contour students. It just so happens that Karoline is good friends with our course leader, Gillian Proctor. So, not only does she get what it means to be enrolled on this course, it meant we were finally offered some tailored advice from an industry point of view. She had a laugh with us, she got serious with us and she told us the truth.
35,000 Graduates come out of design courses in the UK every year. How many jobs are there? Roughly 6,000.
Yet, am I scared? I can safely say no, actually. I’m not. Because I’m learning to be confident and prepared to back myself up. Brand myself. Grow. Here’s where our title comes in. You can’t eliminate the fact that you will have a lot of work to do, but you can manage it. That’s what every contour student takes their time to learn and in our case, you learn by doing. Something I found myself constantly repeating in the first time of second year was “There’s no time to manage my time!”. It’s hard but I got there, now I’m more ready for the next battle. And for that, I’d like to thank Karoline Newman.
I admit this song is a little ridiculous but its upbeat and positive. And because, let’s face it, Mark Wahlberg.
The Art of Surviving Contour 