Designing My Dream

(Illustration by: Gokul Beeda)

1 year, 5 months, and 11 days into living in the USA. Picture a South Indian kid with lots of stereotypically American dreams, such as travelling to places in the U.S., probably living the American dream. That was me almost a year and a half ago before I enrolled to SU while still in high school.

Getting into the design classroom at SU took a lot of effort and background work. Choosing design as a career was a challenging decision, especially since I come from a political and business-oriented environment. Industrial design was definitely not one of my options as my routine studies during my school years often included math, chemistry, physics, and computer science. That was pretty much it. No after school activities, no fine arts, nothing.

My education was in an Indian, government- led academic curriculum school, and we didn’t have many opportunities to explore skills outside academics. It took my family a lot of convincing, but I finally got their permission to pursue my dream. Since I am the first in my family to go abroad for undergrad studies, all the procedures such as my visa, my college application and other necessities had to be figured out on my own. I couldn’t get any first-hand experience or help from anyone in India or the US who had previously pursued design as their career.

It was hard prepping for tests and putting together applications and essays. The hardest thing till date was assembling my portfolio for the design school with no formal training in art. All I had with me were a couple of sketches I did in my free time, and didn’t look portfolio worthy.

But I never wanted to do engineering or medicine, or “mainstream Indian majors” as some like to call them. I had to do whatever it took for a college worthy portfolio. One drawback about a local Indian education board is that, unlike internationally based boards like the IB, the curriculum never favors the American one. So, during my final high school exams I had to make my portfolio, write college applications, and prepare for my finals all at the same time.

One thing led to another and I’m finally here at Syracuse, sketching designs every day and using design terms, such as aesthetic, organic design, design language, and line weight in almost every sentence. For what it's worth, America taught me a lot — opening a new perspective on social issues to embracing my failures and weakness.

Some things weren’t new to me, such as staying in a dorm, as I had been in a boarding school since 1st grade. What was new and challenging was the way the courses were taught and learnt here. It was a whole new world. In India, we were taught to repeat the words in our text and pour them onto the exam paper but here we had to write papers on our own.

Design opened up a new perspective as the subject is not like other majors where you can manage to scrape something together at the last minute, but a step by step process where every step is important. Your work needs to be constantly evolving according to the needs of the world around you. Never in my life have I felt so engaged in an academic process.