Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional: Sohee Cho, Junior Art Director
This is episode four of a series of edited conversations between David Karlins and accomplished communication designers on the theme of making the transition from being a student to becoming a working professional. The conversations explore the challenges of making that transition, the insights of people who have made that transition decades, years, or even months ago, and observations of the relationship between one’s passions and talents, making a living, and changing the world.
In this installment, David speaks with Sohee Cho, a junior art director at RAPP, a global advertising agency. She has worked in product design at Organic and attended CUNY New York City College of Technology to obtain a Bachelors’s in Communication Design. In this interview, she spoke with us about her experience under the internship program MAIP, what she learned while working on her senior design project, and how she became an art director.
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DK: Welcome Sohee Cho. You were a communication design student a year ago, and you are a working professional now. And, as an Asian-American woman, you’ve had to surmount particular hurdles. So let’s talk about that. Start with what you are doing now.
SC: I am currently a junior art director at RAPP, a global creative advertising agency, and have been here for 10 months. I was promoted from my position as their art director intern, which was my job while I was going through my senior year at City Tech studying Communication Design. I was actually working full-time during my last semester of school, and that was only possible because we are working remotely due to the pandemic. So to rewind and give you the timeline of where it all started:
I got my job at RAPP through a program called MAIP. It is an internship program under the trade association 4A’s, which is also known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies. If you haven’t heard of it, MAIP stands for Multicultural Advertising Internship Program and is a 22-week internship. During the Spring, there is a training period where participants connect with real-life industry professionals and collaborate with cross-national teams to work on a project brief. During the Summer, people are then placed at major agency partners, participate in professional development workshops and seminars, and get a chance to learn more about an agency’s work culture through networking.
To get in, they interview you and the application asks you for a bunch of essays about your view on advertising. And then based on your discipline, you’re given a project brief. The application also asks for recommendation letters. So I applied, and was selected! It’s a program that helps you “get a foot in the door”, which was recommended by friends at school who were MAIP alumni. This program helps bridge the gap between graduating and your career, which was exactly what I needed.
Through MAIP, I was selected as an intern for Organic and RAPP. Organic is an advertising agency with a focus on interactive platforms, and RAPP is an advertising agency with multiple locations around the world. Both are under the same umbrella of Omnicom, which is a global media, marketing, and corporate communications holding company. For Organic, which is a smaller agency and more product-focused, I was able to work under a senior UX/UI designer. She was my mentor who guided me through a lot of things, but I was mostly at RAPP. They had me as the art director intern. I chose these two fields as what I wanted to focus on because I was always interested in art direction, but I wasn’t sure what aspect of it I would excel at. The internship went by super fast and I got to work on real client projects. At RAPP, they extended me an offer to come on full-time.
The application process for MAIP was very long, and I was just going through so many personal situations at the time, and it was really hard for me to focus my time on something that benefitted me. But I knew that I was spending this time investing in myself and my future. So that’s why I prioritized any type of internship experience I could get. For me, having that was really important to get me to where I am today.
The work I’m doing now is something I feel like I’m good at and passionate about. I still get to practice graphic design skills while also learning real-life industry experience. I think that’s the most important part, and for me to graduate during the pandemic and find a job, it felt like God’s timing for me. Especially because I’ve been an undergrad for so long. I knew that it wasn’t luck, but a result of all of the hard work that I put in the past few years to get through school.
DK: Just to interject, I wanted to follow up on your point and say that it’s not uncommon these days for people to be going through very difficult situations. Everybody in the world is facing a difficult situation right now, so it’s why I advise my students that when they do run into problems, to not feel like it’s all on them.
SC: I appreciate that because I think that’s something we have to take with us even into the real world, just always communicating with everyone in life. You want to make your voice heard, because no one can read your mind and that’s something I had to learn the hard way, especially while working remotely. If something’s not working for me, or if there’s a deadline that’s too tight and I don’t think I can make it, or if I need help with something, I go out of my way to ask whoever I can. Regardless of worrying that I’m bothering them or that I’m asking too many questions, I’d rather ask than to be wrong and have never asked for help.
I think the key part of my experience at City Tech was being able to communicate with my professors. Because 9 out of 10 times, all the professors I’ve had, have been super understanding and at the end of the day, they just want us to succeed and move forward. The support I received from the faculty was one of the most important factors in me being where I am today too.
You want to make your voice heard, because no one can read your mind and that’s something I had to learn the hard way, especially while working remotely.
DK: At City Tech, every senior in the Bachelor’s in Communication Design program has to eventually complete a class called: “Senior Project”. I know your senior project was something very important to you, can you talk about how you chose your topic, what you did, and the results?
SC: So for Senior Project, everyone had to come up with a major project related to their discipline, whether that was an advertising campaign, website, animation, etc., that would address a certain design problem. My senior project was a UX case study. I wanted to choose a topic that meant something to me, that I would be passionate about. Because if I chose something that just sounded cool, I would have been bored out of my mind and not spent any time on it. The first two topics on my mind were racism and the talk of sex and the taboo around it. I didn’t choose racism, because it was such a prevailing issue that everyone was talking about, that I felt it was too much of a challenge for me to tackle by myself. I didn’t want to be like: “Oh yeah, this is how I solve racism”. It’s so much bigger than that so I was a little nervous to tackle it. So I chose the topic of sex education in schools, and how we’re taught that abstinence is the only way to be healthy, even when it’s been shown that is not the case.
My senior project is titled Scarlet, which was inspired by “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a classic novel about a woman who wore the letter “A” on her dress as a punishment for committing adultery. Rather than a symbolism of shame, Scarlet empowers each person. It was difficult because I was working full time at the same time as doing the senior project. I’m the type of person who needs the pressure of time to get something done. I gave myself a timeline and I tried to follow it. But I had a creative block, like writer’s block, that had to do with my design. So I took a step back, and I was like: “OK. First of all, why do you even want to tackle this challenge? Why does this matter to you?”. The research part is a lot of work, but that’s where all of our ideas come from. So I went back to research and read, to see what they’re doing now about sex education in public schools, especially in middle school and high school. Then, I decided having an app where teachers, students, and parents can find resources that they need would be reliable, especially while we are all remote. It’s an app that can be used for class or for teenagers who want to know something but are too scared to speak up about it to ask their parents, or even for parents who want to have a conversation with their kids but don’t know what to say to help facilitate that. It’s sort of a hub for all of these resources, and I didn’t see anything like that available, besides blogs online.
DK: When you work on a project, you don’t want to go down too many rabbit holes or waste your time on things that don’t go anywhere, but a certain amount of that is inevitable. It’s part of the process.
SC: I learned this also as I went through my senior project and my internship. Even now, every day at work, the process really is conceptualizing, researching, and finding your strategy for whatever your project might be.
I remember the typographer Tony DiSpigna, came and spoke to us at our school, and he talked about the importance of just starting on paper. You don’t need to go straight to the computer. So I still hold on to that, and anytime I’m given a new brief at work, I whip out my paper and pen and I start writing out ideas, or start sketching, because that’s usually where your ideas come from.
…The process really is conceptualizing, researching, and finding your strategy for whatever your project might be.
[A student asks about the experience of being in MAIP]
SC: I got so much from it; to the point I couldn’t not tell people about it, especially for folks at City Tech. I feel like we need this opportunity that helps us and gives us that stepping stone we need to get in. Getting the internship itself, yes that’s great, but for me, it was the friends that I made. Even though it was virtual, it was a world that I’ve never known before.
There were virtual training sessions and at the end of the summer, they had a job fair where they had recruiters from all top agencies come in. It was the first time they did anything virtual, so they were figuring out all the kinks, but basically, we were able to meet with all the recruiters from Digitas, RGA, and Ogilvy, and so many more.
As a BIPOC individual and immigrant, I wasn’t set up for success. Whether it was taking AP classes in high school or applying to colleges, my parents weren’t familiar with the process so I had to figure it out on my own. The typical expectations of Asian immigrant parents are for us to become doctors, lawyers, etc. The advertising industry is something I never considered as a possibility for my future. MAIP is especially impactful because the program provides opportunities in the advertising field to students who may be underrepresented, or don’t have the resources to pursue this field. Meeting other people of color who want to break into the industry was really life-changing.
[A student asks about making the transition from working in a product design internship at Organic, to art direction at RAPP]
SC: I had a very untraditional internship in a sense because I was going back and forth from Organic to RAPP every week. The challenge with that was I would miss one week of what’s going on at one agency, while I was at the other. Eventually, after working on a few client projects at RAPP I was offered a full-time position.
At the time, I didn’t have the privilege of turning down a job just because it wasn’t a direction I wanted my career to go towards. And that’s true for a lot of us; I’ve been working for all of my adult life, even just part-time jobs. Working as an art director is where I’m at right now, and what I’ve been doing is working on my portfolio. I actually just worked on another UX/UI project at work. It was a side project we did for the Adobe Creative Jam competition, but it was such a great experience and I want to add that to my portfolio because eventually, I want to work in product design. So I’m still learning to transition and I don’t know what that looks like, but to go from product design to art direction, the graphic design background helped.
DK: Thank you so much for your time and insights.
SC: You’re welcome! It was not that long ago I was in your shoes as a student, so it means a lot that I could help in any way with my experience.
David Karlins is an adjunct professor of design and digital and written communication at NYU and CUNY, and author of 40 books on digital design technology and culture. His courses are distributed through LinkedIn Learning and other channels.
The following links to the rest of the episodes in this series are here:
