One Method Digital and Design

Alright, this is the last post before I get into the real OneMeth stuff; so again, if you don’t give a shit, skip it.

So I step outta my house at 6:05 AM to walk down to the bus stop; hop on the good ol’ Mississauga Transit at 6:35 to take me to Square One. Next, I transfer to another bus at 7:25 to shuttle me over to the Islington subway station and then jet across on the TTC to Bloor and transfer down to the Yonge line for the last leg of this painful face punch of a trip. 9:05 AM – 3 excruciating hours later, I stumble out from the Dundas subway station (squinting cuz I hadn’t seen daylight for hours) to what I guess was the Ryerson campus aka: a cluster-fuck of random ghetto office-looking buildings that as a collective, make-up the so called university (kinda like Voltron, but shittier).

Based on my experience on day one, you can understand why I wasn’t real motivated to push through the next four years of my marketing degree. I’d go to class (most of the time) and lift my head up (sometimes) to hear my prof babble about the 4P’s of Marketing or Supply and Demand Curves or some other mind-numbing topic for hours on end. Meanwhile, I was buying text books from the Graphic Design program to teach myself Photoshop and Illustrator, and messing around at night with HTML and building my first website in FrontPage (remember that thing?!) and eventually Flash. I was basically working on two degrees at the time, while pushing cell phones at the Rogers store, flipping burgers at McDick’s, hawkin plumbing supplies at Home Depot, selling Smiles n’ Chuckles candy at the CNE, face painting at the Toronto Zoo, and spinnin the craziest Hip Hop & Reggae sets at Brampton’s finest parties! (which I assure you are much finer than they sound)

So finally I graduate with a stellar C+ average (at least I’m consistent)! And I somehow manage to beat out the rest of my graduating class for an entry-level Marketing Coordinator job at Siemens in their IT Services group for a whopping $29K a year – my first real job (or career I guess). Going into this job, I set a few personal objectives for myself — I actually had this list on the first page of my notebook and I’d read every day on my way to work:

• Work your ass off – don’t let anyone second guess your commitment to your job or the company
• Squash your ego – be prepared to do anything that’s asked of you (menial or uncomfortable)
• Earn your keep – ensure that all past coworkers would say “there’s a guy I need on my team”
• Stay sharp – your education doesn’t stop with your degree, so don’t get stale

Over the next year and a half, I managed to use my combo of marketing and design skills to position myself as a one-stop marketing team. I was working 60hr+ weeks creating marketing programs and taking them through to design and execution on pretty much everything we put out to market at that time – they put a lot of responsibility on this kid fresh outta school, but I was definitely up for the challenge. It was a real DIY experience that I learned a lot from – a good ‘big company’ foundation for what was to come.

Moral of the story: Shit don’t come easy – if you want something you better step up and go get it!