Ever since I was a young girl I’ve had some kind of semblance of where I was going with my life, I knew I wanted to be a designer, go to a fashion school and work in the industry. My parents were always very supportive of my goals and ambitions and helped me create my portfolios and apply to many universities. My dreams were then rapidly crushed at the end of my high school career, the Coronavirus pandemic had just hit and I was in the middle of writing my final board exams. The world was shutting down, we were moving to online learning and my parents had become the two most paranoid people I had ever come across. Moving to another country for my education at that point was out of the question. It felt as if my life was put on hold and I was stuck in a rut, everything that I had been working towards my whole life was flushed down the drain because of circumstances I had no control over.
At that point, I had decided that I was going to take a gap year and just try and wait this pandemic out, in the hopes that my parents would see reason and let me stay on my path after getting used to the situation at hand. This was a very trying period of my life and I was in a constant slump with no motivation to do anything, I would be up all night trying to get some kind of hold of my life, but I couldn’t figure out how to. It was in the September of 2020 that I realized that I was so disappointed with the way my life was going, it felt like I wasn’t doing enough and had to get back on my feet. So, I began to look for short-term courses and programs that I could take part in to be more productive and active. This was a very trying period of my life and I was in a constant slump Coincidently, a friend of mine had just enrolled into The University of Wollongong in Dubai and had asked me to check out their workshops and summer programs, that was when I had stumbled onto the Bachelors of Media and Communications program page.
At first, it was just curiosity but looking into the courses and outlines I realized that a lot of this is what I’ve been interested in for a good while but never even considered an educational opportunity because of the goals I had already determined for myself. I enrolled at the university in the Autumn of 2020 and this was an extremely quick process, within two days I’d found the course and the major I wanted and started classes the next day.
I consider myself a bit lucky to have found this course at the time I did, almost everyone and everything is shifting onto a digital platform of itself and creating virtual identities, especially with the pandemic the shift has been even more prominent and intensive. Education, work, and entertainment have found their homes on the internet. The decision to join this course has been one of the best ones I’ve ever made, I have found out that I enjoy doing this way more than I have ever liked designing and have grown so much as a person. In the summer of 2021, I landed an internship opportunity with Publicis Sapient in the media department, I worked with a team of extremely encouraging and knowledgeable individuals. I was a bit skeptical at first since I had no idea what to expect from an internship like this, it was my first time working seriously, and didn’t know how to behave in a corporate setting. Everyone on the team was thankfully very welcoming and motivating, they also entrusted me with a lot of duties which I honestly did not expect for a first-time intern. Doing this internship only further asserted the fact that my life did take a turn for the better since I was really enjoying every part of working for them, no matter the stress of deadlines and approvals. At this point, I really do not see myself going into another field in the near future, but nothing can be said for certain as the future of work is everchanging. Even as the world is shifting online, there are countless new jobs and positions opening up which we would not have even considered ten years ago as said by (Manyika et al., 2017) “If history is any guide, we could also expect that 8 to 9 percent of 2030 labor demand will be in new types of occupations that have not existed before.”
All in all, to conclude, I would say that though there have been a lot of massive changes in the trajectory of my life and ambitions, it helped me grow, become more confident, and has made me the person I am today.
References
What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages: Jobs lost, jobs gained | McKinsey & Company (2017). Available at: https://poojasletters.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/11dc8-whatthefutureofworkwillmeanforjobs2cskills2candwages_jobslost2cjobsgained_mckinsey26company.pdf.
My BCM workshop 