My junior year of high school I took an art class and we worked on the computer to create art. I instantly loved doing this and started to do it on my own. If you asked me what I wanted to do for a career about three to four months ago I would have said I had no clue. I have now found something that doesn’t feel like it’s a chore. I have always enjoyed art but never thought of it as a potential career. I love the possibilities that come with it. Most projects we do are completely up to the student in terms of what the theme is. I enjoy creating things that I am interested in like sports and music. After falling in love with this class I decided to take the graphic design class this year that solely focuses on the computer. This has made me a lot more confident about possibly doing this as a career. In college I will have a lot more technology and specific classes to help me in this field. My plan is to go to the University of Kansas because I loved the campus and they had a great business school and design school. I now like creating projects in my free time that I’m interested in. My one goal in having a job is to get one in which I look forward to going to work. If I can obtain a job that doesn’t feel like work then I will have a much happier life. 

In this short time that I became interested in this career I have accomplished a lot of cool things considering my lack of experience. I have designed my own posters for my room, made shirts for my friends and I, designed murals for my basketball team that will be displayed in the gym, and created the shirts for all the players and families of players on my basketball team. I started off with making shirts; my mom bought a special printer for making shirts and she didn’t really use it because she was very busy at the time. I decided to try it out on my own and I found it really fun. I would create a design on my computer, print it, cut it out and then heat press it on a shirt. Then I started making my own posters through a company called Canva. This year for basketball they didn’t have anyone to do the basketball murals for the wall in the main gym. I created a design on my own and asked them if they wanted me to make all of them. They told me yes and I got to work. Throughout this project I ended up learning a lot about the production side. It wasn’t as simple as making my own design and printing it out. I had to get a huge amount of information about the sizing, format of the program, and collect information that was going to be on the murals. This experience will definitely help me on future projects in which I have to work with other people. 

Seeing my own work get printed and come to life has a sense of accomplishment. I can picture an actual future with making things like this and not just doing it for fun. I’ve already had people ask me to make designs for them in which they would pay me, so this makes me feel good about having a future career as a graphic designer.