School and Work

It has been quite a while since I have written anything on this blog. Part of that reason is I was traveling, partly I was lazy and enjoying my vacation between graduation and work, and the last two weeks, since I have started work, I have been a little distracted. That being said, I am going to skip any writings about my trip right now and I am going to go straight into the topic at hand:

Training in school for work.

No one told me that Carnegie Mellon actually prepares you for the real world. Going into work the first day, I had a flashback of four years ago where I was told the four stages of design:
Unconsciously incompetent, where you don’t know what you don’t know.
Consciously incompetent, where you know what you don’t know.
Consciously competent, where you know what you know, and you do it knowingly.
And Unconsciously competent, where you know what you know, and you do it naturally.

Now walking in the first day, I very quickly learned that I am unconsciously incompetent. That being said, by the end of the week I had graduated to consciously incompetent. I am still there. Still, it was interesting to see the same growth from four years ago happen in another cycle. Still, even more interesting is the value of the lessons I learned in school, even though I forgot them temporarily. In making a series of flow charts and deliverable lists, I made some great progress in the designs, completely forgetting the audience… the President and other executives of PNC Bank. Immediately I went back and reworked everything for the public view, remembering and reteaching myself the tried and true principle that anything in design is based around communication to an audience.

Well, this gets me back in the writing seat. Sorry there isn’t much content here, but no one actually reads this now, I think.