thank you so much nan uh and thank you everyone for joining us uh you know one of the things that um i've been struck by in my time here uh at the stamp school it's just how incredibly diverse all of you are you know as as people uh in your own orientations towards your creative practice and more importantly uh the kinds of creative paths that you have taken in your lives uh and career paths that are so different from each other and um the the aim of this session is really to try and highlight those creative those creative trajectories that you have taken the kinds of differences that you have pursued in your own lives but also provide an opportunity therefore to highlight what were some of the things that actually made it possible for you to get the get to those creative pathways uh what were some of the key things that you did um that helped you along uh in reaching those kinds of goals and so this is really an opportunity for us to hear from the four panelists but also to engage in a larger conversation with all of you to get a sense of what are the things that click that pick that make you make you pursue the kinds of things that you have pursued in your lives and so today we we have um for the discussion the panel discussion itself we have elizabeth maria joseph and elan and and we could not have chosen a very as different uh a group of people with uh very different career pathways um having come to the arts and and then left it uh done different things and then still essentially essentially keeping that that creative uh spirit that actually drives him um i presume you would have noticed in the opening slides the crying kind of careers that they have pursued so what what we are going to do now is to get each of them to say a bit about their their their own creative trajectories and then we will take it from there so we'll start with elizabeth uh so uh elizabeth you you started your career in digital communications and then later moved on to ux design and worked at google and youtube and then your path from then onwards seems to have taken you to a different area now with facebook in uh in relation to social impact i was intrigued by this whole idea of social impact and what um what exactly drove you there and what are some of the things that keep you interested in that so could you speak to that specifically but also more generally about your own career path since you graduated and and and also a bit about your role at y combinator now uh in in relation to advising startups sure um so thank you for having me um and uh also thanks for the opportunity to even sort of think about career path because i don't think i could look back kind of on the decisions that i had made um in this light before so thank you for that opportunity um i think um so when i graduated from michigan it was 2001 and web design was kind of just becoming a thing at the time and i was very much enjoying how to take kind of fundamental graphic design principles that i had learned and translate them into a web environment um but i quickly realized that i had absolutely no idea how the decisions that i were making were actually impacting the people who were using the websites that i was building and that kind of became a cornerstone that definitely pushed me in the direction of ux which was that i really wanted to make sure the decisions that i was making actually benefited people who were using the websites and the products that i that i was building and so and then kind of being curious about that and focusing on that is something that drove me to google um and um and i think i don't know exactly how much detail to go in but i think jumping to the second part of your of your um question which was around social impact i think there have been a bunch of decisions that i have made some of which were more intentional than others some of which are probably better than others um but uh i think a couple things that guided me throughout the time was really the people who i was working with um and that i've definitely made decisions based on the people who i would get to interact with i really have enjoyed bringing design into a conversation amongst engineers and data and product and kind of figuring out ways to sort of synthesize all of our goals into building a product that people will love to use um and um also have made decisions just based on being excited about the product space or the challenges or opportunities that were there and others just because they seemed like they would push me in different directions that i'd be excited to grow um with social impact i was working in facebook just on kind of core what we would call consumer products but things like profile local events privacy and the company made an announcement that they were going to be investing in building a team around social impact or really leveraging how we leveraging the seventh of humanity that was already on the platform to do good for the world and that i found super inspiring because it wasn't just you know kind of um trying to make designs that would and build products that would really benefit people but also then how people could take those products and benefit humanity right or kind of do good for humanity and so that was a and that kind of set me in a directory i wouldn't really consider it a departure um or a huge pivot as much as sort of um kind of a sort of evolution or kind of a next step in what i um how i wanted to spend my time uh doing doing design work um and then currently um i'm just working across a bunch of startups um either kind of helping um companies shape the products the core products that they're building um or figuring out how to build out a design team and make key hires in the design space and so it's kind of touching several different companies in sort of smaller lighter weight ways all right uh thank you alice elizabeth and it's good to hear that you know you don't see these as as a fundamental departure from your interest in social impact and uh the kinds of work you've done before um and also it's it's interesting to to hear also that you are talking you're thinking about it in terms of how to connect different kinds of disciplines and people who are working in different fields for the kinds of objectives that you are you are focused on so it was good to hear that uh ilan um you are now the executive creative director for the city of new york and i can i can only imagine the the struggles and and the challenges of restoring tourism um after the pandemic this must be very busy days for you now um you have been a creative director for many other companies uh uh including uh moma interbans jnj uh just to name a few um so what i was um curious about on for you olan is how art and design students and alums can consider using their creativity in a an education throughout all types of industries which you have seem to have found your way into um and how does it how how did you do it and how does one think about doing it and um can you also talk a bit about how how you got to what you're doing right now and any advice that you think would be helpful to our students other alums who are thinking about some of these fields right now sure yeah i'd be happy to um you know the short answer is i didn't plan any of any of it i just knew that i was a designer i knew i was a designer even before i knew the word um you know when i was a little kid so you know for me oddly enough um coming to michigan was a rebellion against knowing i was going to be a designer so i got in through art um and design um and what the wonderful thing about the university was that i spent a lot of time at um uh taking all sorts of classes from you know mysticism classes to english classes to film classes to this and that um and design you know it it helped me you know i came up when it was the graphic design industry so it was a very different curriculum it was very much tactical it was very much about the skill set and the technique you know what is typography what is design design a wide label you know it wasn't it was it was um [Music] it sort of was really kind of cast in its blue collar roots as a you know like commercial art um and but it was also not too long before the graphic design you know graphic design is an industry when i got out of school it was let's see it was 92 there's a big recession on um and it was really sort of right before the web came along so i sort of had this like leonard zelig like kind of um trajectory where as designs started a graphic design started to fade away and morph into i remember we were talking about things like what is service design what is digital design what do we call it what is experiential design and these are the dialogues that were happening in aiga at the time and so for me it wasn't so much like planning i mean first of all when i got out of school i was really young really immature and all i wanted to do was be a design rock star like you know mike mills or jeffrey keaton at mtv or hollis king um you know a worship blue note a worshiped hat show print all that type of stuff um but um i think that you know when i got i actually did have an interview at mtv and mtv at the time was like the place you wanted to go that was absolutely hands down like if you got a job at mtv you were it um and because i had such a wide focus at school i didn't really have much of a portfolio i had no idea what the you know i here i am no portfolio but with a lot of other kind of experience um going into new york city like the toughest market in the world ever and basically um this is no reflection on the university of michigan or the art school it was more of a reflection on me which was jeffrey he said you might want to go back to school and so what that did was that was sort of my first um experience with okay so i have all this knowledge i have all this understanding from all of the other classes i took in addition to design i didn't know quite where i fit and so that really was sort of the trajectory for me was a little bit of a misfit outcast you know i was in a market with these people who were even from my own school even from art design like they had these beautiful portraits or portfolios um but i was like constantly i was omnivorously curious about so many different things so um i'm gonna fast forward so i i got into you know when the when the uh when the dot-com era happened i i left the small studio i was at and i started up a company with a buddy of mine and we did um sort of these multimedia experiences and presentations long before the infrastructure was capable of supporting it and so we went through that we went through dot bom and i found myself having basically had this digital entrepreneurial experience but again no portfolio like i came out of my own company and we weren't even really doing web we were doing something that didn't really have a definition and so i found myself at that first point of which i've had a couple where i just had to stop and say what do i want to do and i sort of thought to myself you know what i need to get back into typography design basis the museum of modern art um showed up on my radar and uh i thought initially like oh i don't know if i want that job or whatever but anyway it turned out to turn turn into a very like again getting my hands dirty getting back to basics i was just a graphic designer even though i had about 10 years experience at that point i just wanted to get back to basics got paid nothing you know ate beans and rice um but it was it was incredible because i was there at a moment in time when they were redesigning the entire building the entire experience entire structure so this is 2004 and so that was a first hint at again like what is everything that's going on in the realm of design around me that's crossing by my desk so i think this starts to be this notion of of like pick your head up and and what's happening what can you do as a designer and so i got to work on the architecture i get to work on the architectural signage i got to get my hands dirty with with matthew carter and recut you know fonts and and um work with yoshitanaguchi on understanding sort of the spatial qualities of graphic design and wayfinding um and then i got to do things that was the first moment where i started to also realize what is the what is the physical impact of design so we constantly did these gigantic vinyl banners advertising our shows and vinyl is about the worst thing that you can possibly use so i started up a partnership with fry tag and we started to create these fry type bags so basically it's from there that job could have just been me doing exhibition ads but because of this kind of curiosity and because of this misfit outcast kind of point of view um i just sort of dip my toes into everything possible um four years later after starting it was a great run it was a wonderful place museum monitor has always been my home i grew up going there my mom took me there every month and so it was a dream um at about that point where the dreams started to get a little repetitive um i got contacted by a guy named chris hacker um who told me he was going to start the design group at j johnson johnson i hated packaging um i never wanted to get involved in packaging to me it was sort of a i had i had some pretty strong judgments about it but the next stage in this kind of like curiosity addiction was understanding through this this guy chris hacker who is brilliant um don't hate anything that you can change you know if you if you don't like how something is done that doesn't mean you have to do it that way it means that you have an obligation as a designer to step in and try to do it differently and so that that became a huge thing so we started this global um outfit called the um global strategic design office um and i headed up all sorts of brands the highlight was redesigning ky for example which is a ridiculously hilarious and fun project but really what it came down to there was understanding both the impact as a designer but also understanding elizabeth you mentioned working with engineers on the digital side the best partnerships i had were the physical engineers the package engineers because i would always design better with them be like you know i want this thing to be made this way how do we do this and they would tell me about the restrictions of the machinery and the materials and all that we pushed everything to the limit and so you know getting into engineering getting into that also i got into that was my first experience with um sort of creative and critical thinking about brand about what i now call narrative design which is what is the narrative that underlies the products and brands and the the experiences that we have i went around the world doing innovation projects and um i worked with incredible people um and that that was about six years so now they're sort of these two areas that i never thought i would do in you know working in the museum and then working for an international packaging company and then um you know it was it was time to move on um i made a mistake and i will tell this to everybody that i made a mistake which was you know there seems to be a lot of money in this advertising world so i think i'm gonna go to advertising i got an obnoxious salary from uh the advertising agency that i went to um and i realized very quickly there's a reason why i never went into advertising is because the whole milieu was not just not like going from a very thoughtful and very investigative and very humane and very sort of uh sincere organization like the design office at j where we were very human human focused to advertising which was about how many cans of budweiser can we get people to drink was completely just a complete culture shock for me and so that was another thing that i started to understand again to the original question of like what's the trajectory of my career sort of realized very quickly like i really have to give a about what i'm working on because i had been working at museum modern art and then at j for these really good products i've never been tested on that it didn't even occur to me that that was important because i was already doing it so i became sort of a journeyman freelance designer um but so much more it became um much more about sort of strategy and design thinking and design narratives um and i spent some time with sy partners who i met when they did some work with us at j j you know redesigned the business we actually designed vision for jetblue i worked at co collective where we completely redesigned the business of um infinity motors and that kind of had nothing to do with design the way that i was taught again which was typography and art direction and all that this was now like asking questions like what does it mean to an automobile industry when nobody wants to buy automobiles um and so that was that trajectory and then finally you know it was very much in the sort of think space in the brainstorming space ultimately um about i don't know five years of that i started to get really that was the second time that i got to a point where like i can't i really don't like not producing stuff because for all of this innovation thinking most of it never gets done there's great ideas but a lot of barriers to producing the ideas um so then uh i took a pause i just sort of stopped and i said again i gotta get i wanna i wanna i wanna do something that i love i wanna get back to my basics um you know taking everything that i've learned and then i found this role at nyc and company which was the tourism board which is the tourism board city of new york and i'm a die-hard new yorker i mean i've been here for 30 years my family goes back here you know blue collar workers immigrants for a couple generations and new york city has always been i've been to i don't even know how many cities in the world and places in the world but new york city has always been at and it took a couple of minutes for me to open my eyes and say wow um this is this is it this is what i want to do now i want to tell stories about new york city to the world i want to bring people to my hometown and so where i am now is you know before covet it was this effort of let's help people experience the city in the right way rather than shove more and more people into times square what does it mean to be a visitor what does it mean to be a local what does it mean to be a host we did projects with uh with another university that had a um certainly had this innovation program where we we worked with the students this is something that that um the dean and i spoke about doing potentially in michigan where it was what is the future of tourism what does it mean to be a visitor in a you know in a time when tourism is taking over the world and then enter covet and that all turned around so what got me through everything and i'll bring a very long story to a very short and has been this notion of narrative design right so thinking writing words being as important i don't think i think i'm wired that way but i also don't think that i would have had that kind of affinity had i not all the way back in the beginning in michigan gone to michigan really knowing that i was going to be a designer but gone to michigan understanding like there's design but god is a whole constellation of all these other courses so addiction to curiosity and narrative and all that that's been the theme thank you thank you elan uh well one thing is clear not having a plan is not going to bog you down as long as you have curiosity so thank you for that valuable lesson uh maria so you started in art and design and then you moved on to do an mba at raw school here at michigan and then your career has spent across a whole range of things in design finance even advanced technologies with advanced batteries and fuel cells so you are currently now with as a venture partner at arsenal and you are also entrepreneur in residence at the zelda lurie institute here so you're focused on building and investing in businesses and so so how did your early experiences in art and design shape some of the perspectives that you're bringing to the roles that you have right now and that the roles you've played before well much like elan said um and it was a great segue into what we do because design is much bigger than just i mean my undergraduate degree was in industrial and graphic design and i learned that the whole design way of thinking was actually just as important for developing a small business as and and creating new technologies as the mba was because it's a it's a way of thinking it's a way of asking questions of why is something like this how can it be better so i started out designing office furniture for steel case when i got after i graduated i also graduated in a recession so it was tough finding a job and i was thrilled to be able to be designing um office furniture but you know after a while you get tired of designing binder bins and you know you're thinking of the office for the future and all these big ideas but reality sets in but it was fun d working with market marketing people and with engineers because design and creative process is it encompasses so much more than just you know something that you sketch out on a piece of paper it's asking questions how can we make this better how can we make the processes better so that level of thinking led me to want to be go to get an mba because i wanted to be the person leading those discussions making those decisions and after i graduated with my mba in marketing i worked at ibm for several years which is a great training ground for a lot of entrepreneurs have come out of ibm because you learn how to sell and it's important and to because when you have your own company everybody i used to say everybody is a salesman because you have to be able to sell the idea you have to be able to tell the story that makes sense to people and that also involves a great deal of creativity how and problem solving how do i reach the audience across the table be it a consumer or somebody um who who is going to make a decision whether or not they're going to give your company a contract so i um so then after i left ibm to start our own company my husband and i my husband's a chemical engineer he was a chemical engineering professor at michigan and my background was business and we started the company together developing advanced materials so we did we're developing materials that didn't exist for markets that were emerging which is a tough place to be um it's it's i don't know why we picked a tough problem but it was interesting for us so we were developing advanced materials and fuel cells for what was then the idea of an emerging electric vehicle car market and now you have electric vehicles who are really becoming more ubiquitous because of the whole autonomy and you have vehicles that will be able to drive without the driver being actively engaged there's a whole lot of electronics that need distributed power systems but all that takes a lot of creativity so and then when you look to start your own company i've heard some people were have entrepreneurship and working with entrepreneurs you get an opportunity to design the company to be the way you want it to be how do people work together how do you create an innovative environment where people aren't afraid to fail so they can come up with the next generation we're not doing just incremental improvements we're trying to come up with something new so those questioning those processes of how you go through the design thinking with stuff that i learned at michigan in the art school and that that helped us be a successful business just as much if not more so than the mba because you can always hire an accountant you can hire a lawyer you can hire a marketing people it's much harder to find people who can think outside the box so we came up with a new way to interview people but maybe it's not a new way but our way of interviewing people which went through a lot of different processes so that everybody was involved with because when you're a small company you know you added a a person it can create it can change the whole culture so the whole questions of culture how do we want to be how people want to be treated all that was a design project you know so and then when you're coming up with new materials that's a big design project so um the thinking that i learned at michigan and alan samuels was my industrial design professor great professor lifelong um lifelong lessons that have carried me throughout the career it was interesting our company was acquired by another company that ended up going public and they said wow you created so much with a bachelor of fine arts degree and they said it in a negative way okay and i remember even in business school people would say oh she has a bachelor of fine arts degree and they almost want to talk over you until they realize that you were a good student and that you could tell the story and create the good presentations um but we were successful because of that and people tend to kind of pooh-pooh the design thinking but it allowed us to create things in an environment where people could soar i'm very proud that many of our employees have gone on to start their own companies and are very successful and so i think so that's what the michigan design education meant to me and i still do fine arts i mean i paint silk scarves i still do paintings um everything you know that you look at you're trying to come up with the creative way of thinking outside the box well it's interesting that both you and uh and ilan talk about storytelling and and narrativizing and you know that that seems to be a key skill and and you'll be happy to know that we we emphasize at the school uh strong levels of writing uh we we uh students are doing multiple years of of writing uh and we are also really proud that our students are exceptionally good storytellers uh in in many ways uh so thank you maria um next is joseph joseph you are currently uh artist in residence at dartmouth's uh um uh hopkins center for the arts and you are also busy with performances in npr's tiny desk concerts and you have a show coming up or is it on right now at little islands uh new york city free um so you have struck me as one of those highly interdisciplinary people who came to the university with with that that strong interest and then have shined throughout you know um so could you tell me a bit about could tell us a bit about you know what what attracted you to michigan and our program you did the arts performance program but what was what was it that was it were you already interdisciplinary and you came here because of that or was it the other way around that you became much more interdisciplinary as a result of this uh what were some of the things that drove you to us and drove you beyond us um uh yes so i would you know my my mind is the the reckless path of the independent uh artist and you know i i was from michigan i came from southwest michigan i um to be honest i i applied to university of michigan and um that was one attractive plan and but the other attractive plan for me was to move to seattle and be in a band with my cousin who was still in high school at the time i would have had a different trajectory um if that if that had had occurred um but i think i think it's for the best that i uh was accepted and so i came into this you know i came into the school i i knew that i had um that i had a couple different interests that i was interested in in uh cultivating my interest in in music and in art i i was ostensibly a a painter a painting major at the school um i was kind of i wasn't actually part of the inner arts program but i was kind of a proto a prototype for for it for the inter art student i think so i i came into the school at a time of transition for the school they were revising the curriculum and for you know the studio art classes and i think it was really to my good fortune that it was a time of transition so i came into the strange situation of certain classes that were supposed to be requirements actually not being available um which for me gave me a little bit more flexibility and freedom to uh to do other things and to kind of design my own um my own course of study and which which might not might not have made sense from the outside but made some kind of sense to me so i um i remember also kind of petitioning to you know i knew i wasn't going to be a sculptor i knew i didn't really need to do three-dimensional work and so there was a 3d requirement that i could have fulfilled but i convinced um that the associate dean until i said can i take uh voice lessons as my sculpture credit um it's four dimensional and somehow that that was convincing and um so i i really got to uh i did study painting i studied uh performance art under holly hughes and that and that kind of you know i was and i was already doing writing it was just i mean both my parents are not by profession writers but by practice and um that was something that was very natural to me and so i i studied started developing narratives storytelling um things that but kind of coming out of the tradition of um the visual tradition and and different people who had used used narrative and and their own bodies and their identities etc in in the context of performance and and really approaching performance as a container for um for my particular interests and and a certain permission to okay i wanna i wanna sing i want to you know and and uh and write and do these different things and it's all all kind of uh performance and i was studying as an opera singer at the same time in the music school under george shirley and i was um uh you know so so i kind of ended up really which it was very formative actually the the experience set at university of michigan for me and for the way i've i've carried on which is that i wanted to develop some of the the skills that are of the of an interpretive performer um but my head was always in the space of a generative artist so the conceptual interests um and a certain kind of criticality um that that really was rooted in visual art and in the art school so um my my course of study was very interdisciplinary and um and then and i and i also just you know i immersed myself in like i went to every stamped weekly lecture before they were required before it had grown into what it is now it was still in a a little lecture hall on north campus and um and so i i i feel like i really you know made them made the most of of things in my in my way while i was there and and and you know i wouldn't have been able to to do that um at a different place and i wouldn't have had the flexibility or the the resources um i moved to new york uh immediately after uh well i spent a couple months in my parents basement but then i then i moved to new york um and i uh got a job at the guggenheim for eight dollars an hour hopping audio guides um in the daytime for a few months and um started performing in operas in this little opera house in the east village at night and then was performing in clubs and generating my own weird theatrical uh concoctions and i i proceeded in this um in this sort of what might look like a kind of spaghetti at the wall uh artistic performance practice where i would and and really really um really kind of being in multiple places at once i mean being kind of in the classical music world but then also in the club world and also in in the art world but they've been necessarily you know not not not in a gallery way or anything but performing in the in you know performing in in art events and things so i i develop publishing little essays or writing about visual art you know so i i really tried to uh honor my own impulses um pursue this strange path and and uh for for several years i i would have you know little part-time day jobs um that you know hopefully were flexible and were color colorful and provided me lots of material as well and um and then you know gradually i uh i was able to to uh make a living as an independent artist and and still my path is very very strange and i'm i'm uh i think that i think that um the features of my work that interest people are also the features that confuse people or make it a little hard for me to be contextualized i mean even you know pre-pandemic it was like 2019 i had uh two premieres of of original performances that were kind of in the contemporary performance world and in opera festivals and then i uh did a run at a club in london and then i uh was the national support act for the rock band slater kinney across the u.s and um so i've gotten to have all these all these really exciting experiences and and and also um be constantly shifting my point of view and testing my work often the same work in different contexts and different economies and uh being able to to sort of look at it with with different sets of concerns um so you know i i lead a fluid and tenuous but exciting existence joseph you talked about yourself as a reckless independent artist i can tell you we are all richer as a result of your recklessness so thank you so thank you everyone uh for uh all the panelists for the air presentations uh what we're gonna do next is to move to uh breakout rooms and i think nan and her team are gonna be talking to us about it but i i wanted to just uh say a few things in in in summary from what i'm i'm hearing you know the the the the stories of perseverance persistence um the the fact that uh curiosity drove a lot of your interests and your pursuits uh the fact that um some of you did not have plans but you were willing to play along and and realize things that about yourself that you did not know about these are all wonderful things that we think that exemplifying good artists and designers and you know it's uh we we are glad to hear that these were these were uh things that drove you and um uh to the kinds of successes that you've had in your lives and your careers and so um nan do you want to uh sure give them the guidance on the the next stage yep um so in a few minutes you'll be broken out into breakout sessions um where each of our panelists will be moderating so you'll have the opportunity to ask them any additional questions i know there were a few in the chat um so feel free to use that time to ask those additional questions but we also want to use it as an opportunity for you to share your experiences as well as students and maybe talk about what was instrumental um when you were on campus as an art and design student in your own creative trajectory and some of the things that were hallmarks and you know making you in defining you know how you moved along your paths and um some themes that you think that um you know are sort of um important for us to hear and to know um we will have a staff member in each of the rooms to help to help um moderate those conversations and facilitate as well you're having any difficulties with the rooms um and um with that we'll spend about five minutes or so um in those rooms does anyone have any questions that i can't answer um i'll look for i can't i'll try and page through with hands i want to just go ahead and ask them please feel free no questions okay great so melissa um melissa and alex can you help break us out into rooms and she's melissa's also posted some uh some questions in the chat that you can use um to help guide your conversation take care we'll see you soon it looks like we've we've had continuation of the conversations way outside of the break rooms but uh uh uh i hope that you had some good discussions in your own groups uh we had an amazing conversation and learned a lot about each each of us um uh would some of the groups like to some some of the people from the different groups like to just uh share maybe one or two insights that came up um uh just for the benefit of the larger group uh ilan do you want to share what happened in your group um yeah i think it was um it kind of came back to trajectory is which uh harris ahmad studied um you said uh biology your biology major but now you're a lawyer and i'm a lawyer and an entrepreneur [Music] we're an entrepreneur with a biology background which i think is kind of fascinating um has started a company that is helping children connect with outside spaces um which is interesting um thing um milan seems to be going in eileen whacker is the mother of student i apologize for that you guys hear me now yep we can yeah i have a terrible internet connection i apologize for that i think that the main theme is that we all go to school thinking this is what i'm going to do for the rest of my life and the ability to just know that like you have no idea where you're going to be two years out of school or 20 years out of school and that's kind of magic because i know a lot of miserable people who have stuck with that one thing because they felt like they had to um and i think ultimately as designers if you've got a design art and design mind you're a drifter right you're an outsider and that's to be celebrated so that's sort of what i got the sense of in our group is how much change happens over the course of time yet at the same time um as long as you have certain basic skills to fall back on like the critical thinking or the narrative design the the desire to listen to and tell stories and make stories um it's kind of what it's all about thanks elaine uh anyone else uh um joseph do you want to share what what happened in your group if if there are some interesting things that came up you're muted all right here i am i think yeah you know similarly we talked about uh trajectories and and we shared um shared different experiences and paths and um you know we tried to see if if anybody um had had uh set out with a plan that was realized just as as conceived and um no one no one emerged so and we also talked about uh we talked about curriculum different approaches um and and what's what are the virtues of being in an art college in the university setting uh being an auto didact you know so these different different uh considerations also kind of came up a little bit yeah thank you so much joseph uh i'm just looking at the time is 227 uh i nan do you think i i can close what do you think yeah i think we can if no one has any last burning comments we can anyone has a burning comment why don't we do that thank you for doing this oh thank you julie uh well look you know i i i think that you know one of the things that i'm i'm concerned uh constantly surprised by um pleasantly surprised by as i've met our alums and i regularly meet our students and hear about what they are thinking about uh is that you know we in the creative field um are really versatile people you know versatility is an important part of who we are as people you know and that's what that's what allows us to [Music] succeed even when we don't have a plan succeed even when our plans don't actually work out the way we wanted to succeed because we actually have [Music] a persistence and a perseverance uh allows us to know what we value and go after that with a with a certain amount of uh verve and and drive and and uh you know each time i meet with our alums and and hear your stories and your creative trajectories as much as as much as some of the different directions you might have taken might be have might have surprised you at different points i think that what i heard from many of you is when you look back every part of that every part of that journey every every side steps you you made every different routes that you took um uh seems to have let you where you are today and you know i'm i'm proud of everything that many of you have achieved and will continue to achieve and i i i i take pride in the fact that we have an amazing group of people who continue to make the world a better place because of who they are and the kind of creative energies that they bring to the world we are going to end the session but you know i wanted to stress again please keep in touch and we will be able to i think someone asked about linkedin connections i think we can easily do that we will find a way to make sure that all of you have an opportunity to connect with each other especially those who are in those who are in the same groups or beyond you know i i i really think that that's the that's the the primary objective of these these sessions is not for us to not only for us to get to know you but for you to get to know each other and make those meaningful connections and so thank you again for participating and please stay connected and i do hope at some point we will get to see each other and share a meal in person so thank you very much take care everyone stay safe
2021-10-12