Design Student Takes Her "Designer Finals" on HGTV
The San Francisco Chronicle has a good profile of Sandra Stoner, an interior design student who was chosen to participate in HGTV's new home-improvement show, "Designer Finals". The show gives students their first full-scale, real-world client project and then films them as they have just 48 hours to pull everything together. While her project -- redesigning a family room -- turned out well, Stoner learned how different things can be when you're working with real clients. Managing time, materials, and supervising her volunteer crew proved to be more difficult than the design itself:
“'It was hard trying to work with clients. I'd never had to do that before -- try to convince them of my ideas, and stuff like that,' says Stoner, who also is pursuing a bachelor's of fine arts degree at the University of San Francisco. 'Plus, I'm not that great at bossing people around.'”
That's a great point; people, students especially, sometimes forget that there's a lot more to design than coming up with a solution and implementing it. You need to be able to manage a team, smooth over disagreements with clients or contractors, and use your powers of persuasion to get everyone on the same page. When dealing with real-world projects, deadlines, and clients, your "people-skills" can be just as important as your design skills; you need both to be successful.
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