I went to a charter arts school here in Calgary for my primary scholing. this helped me to become more creative, and gain an appreciation for design. during my time at Calgary Arts Academy, I spent a lot of time working on collaborative, creative projects which helped me to gain problem solving skill.

Starting when I was 15, I began working at Connie and John’s Pizza in east village. After working there for 6 months they asked me to move up to the main restaurant in the building Charbar. Since then, I’ve worked in every part of the kitchen, from prep work to large corporate events! Working at Charbar helped me to learn how to work in a high pressure environment with changing menus, locations, and equipment. Going into my future career as a technologist, I believe this experience will help me to withstand the high pressure environment and strict deadlines. Taking orders from a chef in a restaurant is similar to taking design cues from a project lead. Maybe I need to plate a dish differently, or maybe a detail would be better represented using different line weights, but in either case my hope is that through constant pressure over time my end results will continuously improve.

More recently, I had several friends from school go into Student Works  Painting as franchisees. As franchisees they required marketers to advertise the painting service. Since I was personally acquainted with them, I felt confident in their abilities to provide good services and was happy to help market their business through door to door sales. While working, I became more confident in my public speaking abilities, and became more capable at learning what clients would want and conveying that to the rest of the team. It was important that I made clients feel that their needs were understood, and that they would be confident in our ability to provide for them. Looking to the future, I hope to use these skills to better interpret what a client or project manager is looking for, and better understand how design impacts the end user.

In my time at SAIT, I have grown to better understand where I exceed and where I should rely on others. I find that I excel at problem solving, and working under strict constraints. I am not the most skilled designer (most of my projects are basically a box) but taking advice from instructors, mentors, or clients, I am able to for my designs around the constraints provided to deliver a high quality end product. One of my favorite things to do as I near the end of my time at SAIT has been comparing my newer drawings to my older ones. Each semester I have drastically improved my skills, and I hope that as I move into industry I can look back at even my capstone project and feel the same way about it as I do currently about my first semester project.