It’s about time I got around to blogging about my internship. I’ve spent the last months here at Klirr Stockholm and I’m having a jolly good time. I guess what surprised me the most is how genuinely un-scary it is. I’ve truly dreaded the internship since the day I was admitted to Hyper almost two years ago, but every day around the office is just downright pleasant. So far I’ve learned how to make Drupal-based sites, and I’ve also put down a lot of time working on consumer and competition analyses for our planner.

A few of my lovely co-workers.

The view from the web-cave. These guys are working on citybanan.

Life in the advertising world is sweet.

If I have any regrets I guess it’s that I’ve largely been ignoring Flash in the past – back at Hyper we sort of regarded it as a dying technology, but I guess we were a little ahead of our time because there is a LOT of flashing going on here.

Another problem is that I’m still trying to do everything, scared of narrowing down my options. Like, I think what I really want is to get into the copy/creative or planner side of things – but I cling to web developing because it feels like a safer back-up option, something that’s more likely to land me a job in the end.

Our time at Hyper Island has come to an end, and I feel a pressing urge to say a few words about it. If you are someone thinking about applying it might interest you to hear from a soon-to-be graduate, all though I can’t stress enough that this is completely from my point of view. I know others experienced very different things.

The good
I LOVE the fact that the students are treated as competent, smart, talented adults. As a student at Hyper Island you feel valuable to the organization. If you approach a co-worker with a problem they might not always be able to help you, but they listen to you in a respectful manner and you get taken seriously. It’s not at all like at the university, where the professors (in my experience) view the students as bothersome interruptions in their research.

The close ties to the industry are a huge part of what makes Hyper Island great. Working with real clients motivates you in a way fictional projects never could, and dealing with clients and visiting them at their headquarters is great for your self-esteem; it made me feel really professional and grown-up. The many lecturers from different agencies provide good insight into the business, and on the whole I think it’s pretty effin’ great that the market sets the curriculum – I wanted to learn the things I needed to know to get a job – that’s why I was there.

The bad
Sadly, the “learn to learn”-philosophy didn’t really work for me. During several of the courses, which were all based on group assignments, I sort of felt like the fifth wheel – not really getting a piece of the action but rather getting stuck doing some unimportant task. Often there was just not enough work for five people, like when we were creating a visual identity for a brand. Even though we were constantly encouraged to “leave our comfort zones”, during most of the courses everyone just did what they were already good at. So in my opinion Hyper Island is a great place to try your wings if you’re already a decent programmer or designer, but as a foundation it’s not much to stand on.

Another school motto of sorts that I had a problem with was the constant expectation that we create something “cutting edge”. The Experience Technology module for instance lets the students experiment with an existing piece of technology, like a Wii-remote or a web cam, in the purpose of creating something completely unique and radical. It’s just that I don’t believe that you can produce something cutting edge without learning the basics of the field first – Picasso didn’t invent cubism until he had mastered the traditional way of painting, for example. (In my group, this one dude who was already a tech-wiz did the whole thing. He even worked on it entirely from home so the rest of us didn’t learn SQUAT).

The ugly (the stuff that I should have done better)
I wish I would have set up clearer goals for myself – that way I could have focused on achieving them even through bad groups and assignments. I also wish I wouldn’t have let myself get sidetracked so much by this whole advertising thing – I came to Hyper Island to learn the manual labor of digital media, not just to come up with campaign strategies and slogans and such. Also, before I came to Hyper Island, I didn’t know what an rss-reader was – and when I found out, boy was I stuck. Riding on the wave of the information society was an incredible high, I felt like a sponge that just had to suck everything in. I spent so many hours last fall just reading the latest about Sarah Palin… Well, I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time, but I sure could have balanced it better.

This is what I looked like and felt like most of the time at Hyper (sans the mustache).

What about the UGL-course and group processes and stuff?
I’m not sure – it didn’t affect me that much, I’m sorry to say. Or maybe it did, even though I don’t realize it yet. I hope so.

To sum it up, I have ambivalent feelings about Hyper Island. The most important part (maybe) is yet to come; the internship – and maybe in a couple of years I’ll look back at this time and decide that Hyper Island was a defining step in my career. Or, I’ll regret not choosing a more conventional school. The jury’s still out.

I’m 24 years old and i still haven’t begun to bring in the big paychecks. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got to thinking about all the wrong turns I have made during my career (as you can expect, this did not help me get to sleep at all). I finally boiled it down to this:

6. I wish I hadn’t given up on playing the recorder when I was 8. Yes, it was utterly lame, but what I really wanted was to play the saxophone, and I think I could have one day – if I had shown maturity, diligence and willingness to stick with the recorder until I earned something better. But I also blame my parents for this; I think they could have been a little pushier and forced me to continue.

5. I wish I had learned to speak French. You see when I was young, Spanish was the new hot thing in town. Barcelona was the no.1 hot spot for travelers and so on (I know they speak Catalan there, but never mind). Anyway, when it was time to choose a third language I never even considered my other options and now it just doesn’t sit right. Every time I hear something uttered in the beautiful language of Proust, Sartre and Piaf I feel a small pinch of sadness.

4. During my year at “folkhögskola” I wish I had practiced art instead of creative writing. Sure, I got out of there with some decent poems, but the art students – who I believe initially were no more talented than I – each made huge, awesome oil paintings that totally blew me away. A solid background in traditional art would really have gone well with my current aspirations to be a digital designer. Alas!

3. I wish I would have taken an interest in computers earlier in my life. This isn’t irreparable, but I’m just curious as to what events might had unrolled if I, at age 10, boldly would have stepped into the new computer room at school, chased away some of the boys with Nick Carter hair-do’s who were always occupying the machines and demanded that someone teach me how to work those interesting contraptions. Instead I was probably sitting in class writing an essay about elks or something, not getting on board with the digital revolution until many, many years later.

2. I wish I hadn’t wasted 2,5 semesters at the university. To cut myself some slack, I couldn’t possibly know how much the world of academics sucks. I thought it was the way to get ahead in life, that an academic education would eventually lead to a job or at least make me well-read and smart. Instead I had to endure a bunch of whimsical nonsense under the principle that science strives to find knowledge – any knowledge, it doesn’t discriminate between the useful and the useless. But this is a topic for a whole other blog post.

1. This isn’t really a career move, but no list of my mistakes would be complete without it; I wish I hadn’t gone for the first apartment that was offered to me by my current landlord. The circumstances are complicated, but – in a nutshell – I apparently had this insane amount of queue points or whatever gathered and I could have landed a pad anywhere. I could have lived on Södermalm, instead I’m stuck at 25m² in lousy Årsta where there’s no subway and no one ever comes to visit.


Well, there you have it. I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to say that I don’t really regret any of it, because these mistakes made me who I am today and so on. Nah. I will say this though; it looks like most of my regrets are about the things I didn’t do, so I guess that particular cliché is true.

For our final project at school we’re working on a Cluedo-style murder mystery game for facebook (instead of coronal Mustard and so on, the characters will be played by your facebook friends). Can’t reveal too much yet, but here’s a sneak preview of some evidence:

I’ve ranted about this before, I know, but – well, it’s time to have another go at it; I’m getting so sick and tired of the douchy remarks us PC-owners have to put up with at school. It usually goes something like this:
1. A PC-user utters something that could be construed as criticism towards his or her machine, such as “I can’t open the file you just sent, could you please try saving it in a different format?” or “The Internet connection seems unusually slow right now, don’t you think?”
2. Everyone in the vicinity look up from what they’re doing and yell: Buy a Mac! (followed by superior snickering)

And just like that I’m thrown 15 years back in time, feeling bad about myself because I don’t have the right brand of sweat shirt (Champion by the way, and the year after it was Fruit of the loom). I know my classmates don’t mean to be hurtful; they probably just think they’re giving good consumers advice. But they come off sounding like Marie Antoinette or something. Ah yes, thanks for the brilliant tip – I’ll just dig around a little at the bottom of my purse for that 18 000 SEK and then I’m off to the mac store!
Wankers.

I’m finally starting to get the hang of Adobe Illustrator. This could totally be a real label for some Halloween-related junk, right?

It’s actually for a facebook app that my project group is developing, where you can throw toilet paper and eggs at your friends. I hope the final result won’t be to obnoxious.

I started my own company and put together a small website to go with it. I felt that the portfolio I made in March didn’t really reflect on my abilities today, so it feels good to have shed it. Also, the old portfolio was centered around my charming, quirky personality, whereas the new one will be based around the content. Feels fresh, more professional. Check it out at www.prettypretto.se.

I find this HIV-awareness ad very disturbing. Undoubtedly, that’s the intended feeling. But it seems to me like the ad confuses the carrier of the disease with the disease itself – only one of those two things is a great evil comparable to Hitler. One point for edginess, none the less.

Honestly, I think the reason I sacrificed my first sweet days of vacation to help out at the recruitment days was to boost my self esteem – I remembered how insecure I felt when I applied a year ago, and I wanted to be one of those successful, experienced students who had really made it. Even though I don’t feel like that at all.

The second-to-last module at hyper Island has been the most rewarding so far. We formed our own ad agencies and worked with three parallel real clients. I was a copywriter for our agency and it felt pretty good just sticking to what I do best. It made me realize that’s probably what I should be doing, instead of desperately trying to become awesome at design or programming – because I’ll never be as good as it takes to make it in this business anyway. Or maybe I could if I really worked at it, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

One extremely frustrating part of the module was trying to come up with a name for a new product that one of the clients was launching. I can’t go into details, but the problem was that the .se-domain had to be available. There’s not one bloody free coherent domain name out there! It drove me crazy. Damn, I wish I would have had some foresight back in the early nineties and registered all the nice domain names I could think of. Pretty easy investment. Sure – I was only like five years old back then, but still.

Another challenge was writing the script for an animated presentation of a big, important, government owned company. Our very talented animator and I were in a constant struggle where I wanted to put a lot of serious information in the presentation, whereas he only wanted to mention things that would translate into awesome animations. Anyway, the client was really happy with the result (quote: “It gives me goosebumps!”).

The third client was a gambling site looking to establish itself on the Swedish market. Working with that company made me feel evil. But I also kinda liked it – the fact that I had completely sold myself to the devil. It was a new low, but it was almost thrilling to try out my manipulative powers.