For those recently in the work force, what are your biggest surprises and learnings so far?

A LOT. School to me was essentially giving me the ingredients - presentation, design, basic html. Work is where I make the fucking sandwich.

Actual understanding of internal deliverables can be really hard to grasp - in school you're always following a syllabus, there's a checklist you're ticking off.

Knowing what to bring for an internal review versus a regroup versus a client presentation - well that just takes time. Figuring out when it's okay to play outside of the box is also a delicate ecosystem.

Digital thinking is also something I never learned in school (contrary to popular belief). It's one thing to slap a "we'll use Twitter" on a campaign, it's another to understand the social structure or if it's even the right platform.

There's also the amount of time that everything takes. In school you're churning out campaigns, concepts, and prototypes 2-3 times a month.

There were fully working, fleshed out campaign pieces with a look and feel. Sure, it wasn't an Emmy winning spot or a 6-figure budget. But it was done with finesse and care.

In an agency there's really no true sense of agile. Everything is a long process (albeit with much greater complexity and total completion).

I have also suffered the opposite of that - I struggled at a startup working as a product designer because our wireframes were whiteboarded out and then we went straight to photoshop. To me that was a broken process - where was the thinking? The big picture strategy? The user flows?

There's one huge thing my college classes never taught. It could have been an entire class on it's own, called:

"Routing, Redos, and Client Changes: How to Keep Your Work (and Sanity) Alive"

In class, we would present concepts, and they would be graded. End of story. That's so far from reality in an agency. You'll concept, flesh out chosen ideas, and then route them internally before going a few rounds with the client as well. Along the way, everyone reviews and makes edits, and tons of small and sometimes large changes get made to the work. You often reach a point where you ask "Is this even my own idea anymore?"

Finding peace with this, and more importantly, learning how to thrive in that environment is key to making good work.

I'll be the first to admit that I bow at the altar of my education. Brandcenter prepared me in ways that no "on-the-job training" could. I know this because I had a whole other career before I decided to go to grad school.

That said, grad school was sort of one half hell and one half heaven. They literally tried to break us, and did. But we were also surrounded by peers/professors who cared about the work as much as we did. Who fought to do more, harder.

Grad school didn't prepare me for the greater apathy of the industry. It didn't prepare me for the politics, or the stakeholders, or other hierarchical challenges.

Or for having to explain how the Internet works. Heh. Coming from the tech industry, that was always more inherent.