Going to college wasn’t exactly my cup of tea—at first.

After a grueling four years at an unforgiving high school packed with 2,400 other students, I was quite ready to move onto bigger and better things. My questionably volatile relationship with my parents only made that drive to leave the nest stronger. But when I finally got around to college, I unwittingly made the wrong choice (for me). I picked business school.

(What’s funny is, years later, I find myself in business and loving every minute of it!)

But business school itself was not the college experience I needed. So I set out to change it.

My first few weeks of business school felt just like high school again, except there were ten times more people in my lectures, none of which I knew. (The Tempe campus at Arizona State University is one of the ten largest campuses in the country.)

It felt dark and cramped, like this:

I felt alienated. This felt like the opposite of what I’d envisioned.

Granted, for most students, the first couple years of college are packed with “gen ed” courses—nothing specific to your major. This is a flaw in college itself, but that’s for another story. 😋

Still, I’d envisioned a much more collaborative and creative experience.

I continued along like this, unsatisfied with my classes, until spring semester, when I set a meeting to speak with my counselor. Within a few minutes, she understood I would probably fit much better in a design program and made the recommendation that I switch majors.

As you might guess, the thought of design school made my heart race—how hadn’t I thought of that myself before?! I went into a Business Marketing major because I wanted to be in advertising—but I wanted the creative parts of advertising, like designing the ads. Not courses described like this:

Comparatively, design school sounded like angels singing from above:

So, with a skip in my step, I rounded out my last days in business school. I put in the minimum amount of effort to just get by in my economics and CIS classes. And I focused instead on finding a cool design internship to get a head start on my new path.

Like any curious job seeker, I started perusing the job boards in search of something that spoke to me. Most of the entry-level design jobs and internships sounded pretty boring or were for boring-sounding companies. I found a few decent ones, and I sent my resume into those black holes (this was before Crash existed 😉).

Within a few weeks, and before the semester had even finished, I’d somehow managed to get hired as a design intern at a software startup before I even knew what startups were.

Once school ended in June, I started at SoftPoint as the design intern. I quickly realized my “internship” didn’t involve working with (and learning from) a professional graphic designer. Instead, I found out I was the graphic designer. 😱

The environment was pretty casual and open; it felt something like this:

Before actually having any official design education, I did everything from rebranding the company (my logo and tagline are still in use at the time of this writing, seven years later!) to designing app flows and screens, designing marketing brochures, and even writing copy for those brochures.

All in Photoshop. 🙈

My time at SoftPoint taught me to work on just about every type of design that a small software company needs. It was incredibly valuable, and I’d show you all my work—except I signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevented me from publicly displaying it as my own.

During my internship, I also started design school, which was such a breath of fresh air compared to the previous school year.

Right from day one, I felt like the studio concentration was exactly what I’d been looking for. It felt like high school art class on steroids—everyone was serious about being in the class, the professor had tons of industry experience, and the curriculum was highly hands-on.

Wouldn’t you feel right at home working like this?

I made friends, collaborated on assignments, learned techniques and the history of graphic design. I continued working part-time at SoftPoint throughout the school year, which gave me a ton of real-world context for what I was learning. My work got better, and, for the first time in my life, my education felt relevant.

I also happened to be living with some friends in a classic college house—parties every weekend, and way too much distraction to be a good student. 🙈 By the end of the school year, I hadn’t put much effort into either my capstone project or my final review projects, one of which consisted of meticulously drawing dozens of gradient lines and typographic elements with a hand-cut carpenter’s pencil.

Needless to say, cramming these projects together in the last four days of the semester was not the way to stand out from the other 200 first-year students to become one of the mere 45 selected to continue in the Graphic Design concentration for the remaining three years.

Needless to say, I didn’t get into the program.

I was pretty upset at the time, but I didn’t let it stop me. With the help of my advisor once more, I switched to a Design Management degree—something between Graphic Design and Business Marketing, minus the design studio classes. This solution was perfect since it took into account the business school credits I’d already accumulated, and allowed me to graduate in four years after all.

After my sophomore year, I finished my internship at SoftPoint and moved on to a customer support representative (CSR) role at TinyPrints. I learned a ton about working with people during this time and even got to exercise my design skills a bit:

It was an amazing experience, and if you like working with people, I highly recommend that you get a job in customer success—even just for a year or two. Supporting customers on the phone and live chat taught me to be concise and well-researched, polite and empathetic, and to avoid taking things personally.

Of course, I wanted a design career. I tried to transfer into Shutterfly’s Production Design Team (the people who take terribly designed holiday cards and turn them into something halfway decent before getting printed), but company management wouldn’t let me switch. So I took matters into my own hands again.

Once more, I started hunting for design jobs just like how we teach here at Crash, except I didn’t have the benefit of an awesome tool built just for job hunting. I found a few promising-looking roles, and I submitted my resume and application the old way:

Thankfully, I landed one interview for a layout designer role at an educational content company. (The job required using InDesign to flow copy [text] into these new templates that they’d paid to have designed.) I knew nothing about InDesign—other than that it was an Adobe product—and I knew Photoshop really well.

When the hiring manager asked if I knew how to use InDesign, I lied and said I did. I must have been convincing enough because I got the job.

I wound down my customer service career and spent my first four weeks learning on the fly in this new design job. It was a thrilling experience—I love being challenged to figure things out quickly—and over the next few months, I became something of an InDesign expert—getting paid $17/hour, the highest wage I’d ever had. 🤤

About five months into the gig, my manager asked if anyone on the team was interested in creating custom illustrations for the educational workbooks we were laying out. I volunteered immediately, saying I knew how to use Illustrator (not a lie, but I certainly hadn’t used it much!), and they gave me the role. This was another thrilling experience to beef up my design software skills and techniques.

During this job, I befriended an older designer named Mark. Mark was a former art teacher, a decent designer, and a chronic cynic of life—always with a tongue-in-cheek opinion about the topic at hand.

Still, Mark gave me some valuable feedback on personal design projects and told me about a renowned design agency in Phoenix: Moses, Inc. He spoke highly of their creativity, unique approach to design, and award-winning track record. Intrigued, I started developing a soft spot for the counter-culture agency and decided to figure out a way to intern there.

Don’t forget, during this time, I was still in design school.

Despite the fact that my major (Design Management) was a non-studio concentration, I still wanted to take some classes available only to the “studio students,” like Graphic Design majors. I spoke with my advisor about this, who admitted that I’d only be able to take studio courses if a professor approved me.

So, with a chip on my shoulder, I reached out to one of the professors teaching a “restricted” course and simply asked her if she would approve me to be in the class. I shared my enthusiasm for the subject and the reason I hadn’t gotten into the program. I was honest about why I hadn’t made it (partying, ugh) and what I had learned from the experience.

As you might have guessed by the title of this section, the professor approved me! I was thrilled and started that same week.

Being in this studio-major-only session gave me access to some particularly interesting information. It also gave me connections to classmates as well as the speakers invited to come in and share lessons with us. And, most importantly, it exposed me to something special: the Phoenix Portfolio Review.

I didn’t wait until college was over to weasel my way into the industry—and you shouldn’t, either. Design jobs and internships aren’t unlimited, so if you want a spot, you’d better go get it fast. The best time to start was yesterday—the next best time is right now.

By the end of the night, I was already typing up thank-you emails to the professionals I’d met. I sent them out immediately and got a couple short responses back. I knew I needed to do more, though.

A couple weeks later, I’d found some job listings online and used them as an excuse to reach back out to my new connections. I followed up to find out if their agencies were still hiring for any of those positions.

I also reached out to Matt at Moses to schedule a time to go check out their space. We settled on a date, and I continued on my job hunt. Three weeks later, it was time to visit Moses Inc.

As luck would have it, the day of the tour, my car broke down. Armed with nothing but sheer force of will and my girlfriend’s bike, I took the light rail downtown and biked the last mile to Moses’s building.

A much-less sweaty Matt Fischer welcomed me in and offered me some water to cool off. He showed me around and introduced me to some folks.

At the end of the tour, we went into the conference room, and he asked me about design school and what my plans were. It was the perfect set-up for me to ask about jobs!

I told Matt I was looking for a junior designer job and asked if they were hiring. He told me that, as a matter of fact, they were opening up four internships that fall—the only downside? The internships were unpaid. I was pretty bummed but not completely dejected. I told him I’d think it over and get back to him.

I mulled this decision over a long time. I needed money, man. I’d lost my layout design/illustration job due to a personality clash with our project manager. I didn’t have my next move lined up. And I so badly wanted to get into the real design world, the agency world.

A few days later, I made up my mind to accept the unpaid internship, find a part-time job to cover my expenses, and do my best work at Moses to hopefully turn the internship into a job. I sent in my application and wrote Matt to ask him to keep an eye out for it. For two weeks, I hustled to build some sample projects to share with him. As soon I completed one, I’d send it over.

Two weeks later, I was the newest design intern at Moses, Inc.

Moses was the best thing that ever happened to my design career. It taught me things school never could have, and I went on to found my own creative agency afterward.

Throughout my short career, I’ve been a full-time in-house designer, a full-time freelance designer, a creative agency owner, and everything in between. I’ve built projects in every Adobe app that exists, from graphic design to illustration, from photography to video editing and animation, from Wordpress to bootstrap. I’ve published work, I’ve sold work, and I’ve lost work.

Here are some lessons for every young creative, often learned the hard way. Hopefully, I can help you learn them faster than I did. 😋