How the hell do you get from law to design?
Or: how I ended up in Ironhack.
If you’re up for a personal story that spans over 2 decades (yes, I guess I’m not super young anymore 🤫), then keep reading. I’ll sum it up. A lot.
So…remember that moment back in high-school when somehow you’re supposed to magically know what you wanna do with the rest of your life??
To all fairness: there are some people who have a very clear idea very early on in their lives of what it should look like. And others don’t but somehow get lucky or just question things less, I guess?!
Well, I belong to neither nor.
So there I was, 18 years young, doing eeny-meeny-miney-moe to decide my career, my future, basically my life, as it felt at the time:
Architecture? Journalism? Art History? Psychology? I’ll end up on the couch myself! Business Management? Fine Arts? Interior Design? …? …?
Clearly, I had a plan. Not.
In the end, I didn’t dare to do something more creative out of fear of not having enough or good enough ideas anyway…and went with the “safe bet”: I decided to study Law. Something I’d supposedly always find a job with and also something I had always said I’d never study ( I have a few uncles who are lawyers and notaries and it always looked super boring😴).
Halfway through my second year, I realized that studying Law in Germany — ah, yes, starting university was my chance to go back to Germany after having (been re)moved from there at age 14 to Spain (where my mom is from) — was a MAJOR project that would need a lot of work and actually mastering The Law…and I really wasn’t interested in that at all.
On the other hand, though, I didn’t want to throw away those 2 years invested in “building my career”…so I looked for a “good” solution. And came up with continuing to study in Spain (thing #2 I had sworn never to do)! Here, the laws were equally boring but at least I could simply learn the stuff by heart, throw it on paper for the exams, and then forget about it. It also allowed me to work full-time and earn me some money which is always nice…
But by the time I got my law degree, guess what? I still didn’t know what to do with my life. And what do you do when you don’t like a topic…that’s right, you continue at it! Must be my German side, I don’t know. 🤷️
So what did I do? I enrolled in a Master’s degree in European Law, yep.
At least I was back in Germany for this 😌. I also met my future husband there and we now have 2 cool kids, so you know…who knows why I studied law, right? But that’s another story.
Going back to how I ended up at Ironhack:
You’d think that with my diploma for the master’s degree in hand, I’d know what to do…I didn’t, hahaha😂😭🤦♀️😭😂
As a way of doing something meaningful while giving me some (MORE) time to figure out what to finally do with my life, I took up work in the family business (thing #3 I had sworn never to do) with the intention to lend a hand for some 9 months or so and look for a real job in the meantime.
I soon realized that what we did there (mainly, we very successfully treat back pain) really worked and helped people and that made me feel good! Also, it being a small family business there was a lot to improve, propose, organize, implement, expand…which is why ended up working there for much longer than initially intended.
A short time after starting to work there, however, I developed a pain issue of myself, which eventually turned into a chronic pain problem.
Looking for treatment and solutions, I found myself at a German airport once. I still had some time at my hands so I strolled through the bookstore — and my eye caught the lovely cover of Flow. I had to have it!
It was the 1st edition of this magazine, originally from the Netherlands, and it mixed creative topics, interviews with designers of all sorts, DIY material, mindfulness articles….and it all being so pretty!
I was totally hooked, it was the first time in a looooong time that I actually read a magazine from the first to the last page!
It also was the first time in a looooong time that I got a magazine subscription, I liked it that much!
On yet another of those seeking-treatment-trips, I found myself flipping through Vueling’s magazine ling. In it, an advert from the design school IED caught my attention. Amongst the different degrees they offer, I saw a “One Year Global Design” course — and thought to myself: “it might not be too late yet for this one in my life!”.
So I contacted them and got information. But before I could decide whether or not to take that step, I had to finish another thing first: an online MBA I had enrolled several years before and that was taking me ages to complete…🤯🙄
By the time I got round to seriously consider the design course, they had changed their grants’ model and now if I wanted to apply for one I had to participate in a contest. Me. Who had never ever participated in any contests whatsoever, let alone creative ones 😱.
But what the heck, I could only not get a grant, which would leave me at exactly the point I was at then. So, nothing to loose, only to win, right?
The motto for the contest was “Design for a better world”.
I brainstormed ideas that could actually make this a better world and decided to propose a redesign of Spain’s lottery selling stands, operated by visually impaired persons.
I had no idea of any sort of design process, had no professional design tools, didn’t have a lot of experience on making visually nice presentations, had to figure out how to compose a clip from several existing ones…and the result, visually speaking was really “cutre” as we say in Spain. You don’t need a translation for that, just have a look below and you’ll know what I mean…
What I did do however was go out and talk to current users of the huts, ask them how many hours they spent in there, how it felt in summer and in winter, did they have air conditioning or a heater, where and how did they eat, …looking back with what I know now, I was doing user research and designing a user experience, very basic and not knowing what I was doing but just following my intuition of what I needed to do in order to get a well-founded proposal.
The result was that I didn’t win for the category I applied for.
A few days after they published the results online, however, I got a phone call from IED informing me that, yes, I hadn’t won for the category…BUT the jury had liked my concept so much that they had decided to give me half a grant!!! Yaaaaaaayaaayayay!!!!!
I couldn’t believe it, the first time I had actually dared to put myself out there with my ideas, I had gotten positive feedback, I was incredulously happy! I remember this day, where I was and what I was doing just as I remember every detail about the moment my parents told me we were moving to Spain, so one makes up for the other 😉
I enrolled in the Global Design Master at IED in 2016.
The class schedule and personal logistics around it were hard, especially as I’m a morning person, so starting class at 6.30 p.m. doesn’t come naturally to me….but everything was SO interesting and inspiring and mind-opening and woooow…that for the first time in my life I got an idea of what it must feel like to do something you’re passionate about!
I learned a lot, I enjoyed myself tremendously and produced a final project I’m very proud of!
The commission was to re-design the eating experience at IED which at the time consisted of a few vending machines very poorly located next to restrooms and in rooms with no ventilation.
And there was one major restriction: they don’t have a license for cooking in the school itself.
So based on research and a proper design process, creating a persona, defining the problem, …I came up with a pop-up kitchen system that included ideas of how to engage the students, integrate the community (both school and neighborhood) and redesign the whole space to fit the concept.
Now, from here on it was clear that design & creativity had to be a part of my life. And not just like a hobby, no, I wanted to have it in my day to day working life. We spend far too many hours at work as to be doing something we don’t enjoy (it took me a while to learn that lesson, I know).
After IED, I worked in a design studio for some time and then my son happened and then I received an email that Ironhack had teamed up with Hays offering grants…
I had been following Ironhack for some time and this email came just at the right moment! I had been part of ADCE’s High Potentials and had to find out that even though hybrid profiles (I guess, that’s what I am then) are the future…we’re not quite there yet. Before you can be hybrid you have to be something. And I want to be a UX/UI Designer. There, I said it!! I know what I want to be in life 🙌🕺🎉
This is why I participated in the selection process…and here I am — 🤗 — training myself to become a UX/UI Designer!
Where to from here?
Who knows.
But one thing’s for sure: I’ll keep following my passion, no more law.
(by the way, I never ever practiced — that was about the only of the “never-evers” I swore myself that I actually kept)
