There is no greater honour than to slam out of the university doors, grasping a First class honours in your hand, but for the creative industry—is this the sign of a failure?
It’s a fair assumption to say all students will attend university with the dream of achieving a first class honours, and so you should with the amount of money it will cost you just to don the title of ‘student’. Though as a student, you did get a discount with that title, so that your pizza is 10% cheaper you lucky git!
Like any certificate, you need to meet a series of criteria to get marks on whether you get said certificate or not. This works well with studying mathematics when there is only correct or incorrect, but in a creative course, does following the rules to a tee actually benefit you?
Clearly these rules are there to help guide learning, but you will only achieve a first if you follow and meet these rules to the best of your ability. I can see the value of learning through structure but if you were truly creative and followed the best path rather than the pre-carved one, you’d be more creative. There exists a common UX analogy of a desire path, a route physically taken away from the designated one, that was chosen because the path the user desired to take a different route other than what was required of them.
In a sense, to take a desire path through your creative education is both brave and foolish, like raising a child or jumping a pit of fire. To see where your course is pointing but to take a different path to the same destination is to rebel the structure and quickly lose yourself the chance of a pre-pathed first. The more desirable path is the most creative and the structured path is the sensible one—but in an industry that thrives on risks and creativity, does sensible become a failure?
Clearly, getting the highest honour from your respective course will be no massive failure, and I certainly felt like a failure when I didn’t achieve such fate, but what your parents may see as a triumph could look horribly different to any perspective employer.
I’m not saying they won’t read the gold letters of ‘First’ and do a little dance that they should be graced by such knowledge and wisdom, but if they are focusing more on the grade your work received rather than the work itself—I think something is wrong there. It may be might hard to perceiver and thrive in your course, and wanting to achieve should not shunned but to just follow the rules and be handed the grade through conformity is a misguided sense of knowledge.
It’s no secret that I shot for a first and felt slightly crushed when I didn’t achieve it, but as I distance myself from education and sit at the desk of employment, I realise that the grade on the paper not only has become irrelevant but also disregarded. I couldn’t even tell you where my diploma certificate is right now.
Upon receiving my grade, I reached out my frustrations to various friends, to be in formed by my favourite Swede – Petter of PJADAD – that I was worrying for nothing about not receiving a first, that my work and attitude would prove more prevalent and, most importantly, that only his mother had seen his certificate and this would be the same fate for mine. How his prophecy proved so true. Never has anyone with such a mad haircut proved so insightful.
To bolster my point, I’m not going to make any case studies but I will relay to you some facts that I know to be true. The diploma that Petter’s mother has, may actually have a first on it but is dwarfed by the mountains of IKEA catalogs that sit upon any European work top and any given season, riddled with PJADAD work. Snask too studied the same course as myself and Petter; finishing it with Thirds, but they are now the studio leading modern Nordic design. And humble old me—I got a 2:1, now in my second post-graduation design job. Which unfortunately isn’t the situation I know many higher achieving graduates to be living right now.
To have a First is not be a failure, in fact it’s clearly opposite to that. But I pose the question whether we should ideal a First making you the most academic graduate possible, I question whether the grading of ‘highest mark’ means little more than all criteria was met. I too ask whether having a First makes you a success, whether it leads to greater success or whether it allows for failure through naïveté.
If you have a First, don’t let me shit on your parade, because they are hard to come by and I think that you should be proud of that—but I wonder whether we can define the failure of it’s success, or whether in fact it is a failure of education to brand creativity with categories of success like we would for other academia.
But what would I know, I’m strictly in the (you almost tried hard enough) 2:1 club. And I doubt I’d be slamming down firsts should I have achieved one. *crying face*
