University made me realize that true learning does not necessarily come from a typical classroom, but rather from experiences that allow me to fail in a growing environment, filled with people who can feedback me and support me along the way.

When deciding where this design learning journey would take me next, I automatically excluded any Masters or traditional courses.

I share The New Digital School’s values. I already have a diploma; I’ve already been tested on 90 minutes’ multiple-choice exercises; I want to get out of my comfort zone now; I want to be presented with concrete exercises where I can fail, learn and iterate; I want to get my hands dirty.

Right now, I could not go for a traditional educational method to pursue my path. It simply wouldn’t work, because I’ve already tasted what fighting for your goals feels like. I believe The New Digital School will offer an environment where I can foster my inner curiosity and willingness to learn.

I’ve already started to learn about designing digital products on my own - I’ll share my experiences a few pixels below - but I lack a real life experience with proper business constraints, for example. I lack some guidance and a more close support from a community that is both teaching and learning.

The definitions may vary from community to community, but my goal is to build digital experiences and interfaces that facilitate those same experiences. You can put it as a Product Designer, or a UX/UI Designer.

To craft meaningful and engaging products, I need to

After The New Digital School, I am not sure what kind of environment I would enjoy work in. Something challenging, most definitely. That is something I want to understand in 2018, to build my roadmap. But after a year in the school, there are somethings I am sure I want to collect:

From day one I knew a lonely road would take me nowhere. I had to connect with people that could teach me, guide me, and share their own successes and failures. Therefore, I committed to attend as much meetups and meet inspiring people from the design industry as I could.

These were great environments where I have been able not only to learn new processes and skills, but also to think about my journey. Often I left these events reflecting on the work I was doing and how it would, in fact, contribute to my development.

At some point I felt the need of having someone that would support my journey more closely. We can call that person a mentor. I approached Ricardo Baeta with an odd invitation, which he accepted. We've been working in our relationship since April, sharing both our challenges and learnings along the way. It's been a crazy ride and we both expect much more from the future. Ricardo has helped me shape my perspective about design and I'm grateful for that.

As I got more and more excited about the design world, I knew I was coming to a crossroad where I had to make a choice. Keep digging the theoretical part, or get my hands dirty. I chose the latter.

Even though I’d be making mistakes, I decided to try a couple of gigs on a freelancing platform. But before starting, I defined what my approach would be: I would only focus on delivering quality work and stuff I could use in my portfolio.

Well, things did not turn out as I exactly expected. That was OK, because my learning mindset was absorbing as much information as I could find useful for next proposals. I learned so much about defining milestones, giving quotes and picking the correct clients to work with. But also dealing with rejection, bad feedback, good feedback, lack of motivation, wanting to do everything in a single day, exhaustion and the importance of processes.

I did logos, branding guidelines, redesigned webpages, designed new ones, got introduced to designing for mobile devices and throughout all the mud, I can outweigh the negative aspects with the positive ones.

Taking such a challenge while still learning about digital products, finishing my Economics course and working as a Director of Marketing and International Relations in the University was definitely a challenge, but worth it. All the way.