The Young Creative Council

The last few months have seen us become involved with the Young Creative Council. We blogged about Unite II, a portfolio night that went down a storm, and have been organising a few bits and bobs around that. One of the things we've been trying to organise is to try and get regular contact with universities around the country and start to work with them. So, Luke and I headed on down to UCA Farnham along with a few other grads in the hope that some of our enthusiasm and stories of our own experiences would rub off and inform the next generation of grads about some of the goings-on in the industry.

A few Mondays ago, Luke and I journeyed down to our old uni, UCA Farnham, to give a little talk on our progress in the industry and for us in particular, to give the YCC a face (albeit a couple of ugly faces) to some of the newest grads.

Some of the lovely Farnham-ites

It was great to see how our old course had grown. When we were there our class had about 30 people. The first year now has 65 students – quite an impressive increase. More impressive still was that most of them turned up again after lunch! We obviously didn’t bore them enough.

Fellow grads who presented with us were Louis Downs, a spirited entrepeneur, Lauren Dyer, now at DDB Health, Helen Trickey and Becky Coyle (UCA Epsom grad) from Rufus Leonard and Will Marsden and his partner Jordan Down from Ogilvy. All of us offered a slightly different perspective; Louis has gone it alone since graduating, having dabbled in publishing, web design and branding; Lauren (who is easily the most motivated person I’ve met) tried to encourage people to avoid fear and ‘do’; Helen and Becky described their respective roles at the agency, from branding to digital design; and Will and Jordan described their experiences or differing cultures at agencies and their way of approaching and delivering work.

As I’ve said, the purpose of our talk was to offer the students a bit of advice from people who have just gone through what they are about to go through. Luke and I found that once we left uni, we weren’t under-prepared but we certainly didn’t expect the situation to be as it was. We don’t in any way profess to know everything or to have it right – but who does? All we can do is offer our perspectives and hope that our mistakes can be built on by others so that they don’t make the same mistakes.

University is the perfect place for groups like us to have contact with – our experiences are still very fresh in our minds, and we know what extra stuff we would have benefitted us whilst there. As well as that, once students graduate their time will be taken up with searching for work and worrying about money (now more than ever), so getting in as early as possible can help to avoid or at least curtail certain of these issues.

Again, as the YCC, we aren’t a bunch of know-it-alls – we’re learning from all this too – we’re just willing to have our brains picked and are more than willing to help out anyone who thinks we can provide it to.

http://youngcreativecouncil.wordpress.com/