Comments on: Unquestioned assumptions

By: Susan Su » Archive » On Personal Branding and (Not) Being Fake

Susan Su » Archive » On Personal Branding and (Not) Being Fake — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:55:28 +0000

[...] friend Charlie Hoehn recently wrote a brave blog post about know-it-all adults who don’t question conventional assumptions and then distill their [...]

By: patambron

patambron — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:09:28 +0000

You are right. Adults too often present themselves as “experts” and as a result do harm to those they are teaching, the ones who don’t know any better. I attended “the best communications/advertising school in the country” and spent the last four years learning how to buy newspaper ads and write magazine copy. When confronted about traditional advertising losing its relevancy, our professors–the leading “experts” in the field– promised us not to worry, that these vehicles will always be in demand and there is always a market for “big ideas.”

How many of my fellow graduates do you think found a job as a copy writer or account executive? Not many. And the ones who have found a job, took jobs they will hate out of sheer desperation and panic. Its a hard pill to swallow, but the best advice I can give to myself and anyone in my shoes is to ignore most of what was was taught, and start from scratch.

The advice I wish I had been given in college (although probably would have ignored): The world extends outside of the classroom. You don’t need a 50 yr old professor to explain the current trends to you. Just pay attention and look around. Read some books. Talk to some interesting people. Decide for yourself.

By: Ryan Stephens

Ryan Stephens — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:17:43 +0000

It’s easy to look back on the last 5.5 years and say, “Damn, I drank a lot of beer and partied in undergrad.” Of course I did a lot of that in grad school too, but I think too often I attribute a lot of the success I’ve had to the knowledge I acquired in graduate school about marketing.

This post -really- got me thinking though. My transition to graduate school was just when I found out marketing was one of my passions; it was also when I still though money really mattered.

Looking back on my college experience there was VERY little course work I actually learned from. But then I think about all these intense discussions I had with the 14 people in my tiny communications classes at our school of 1200.

About gender roles, racial stereotypes, bullshit paradigms, theoretical something or anothers. It wasn’t necessarily that I was learning about “universal truths” about any of these things. It was that I was being challenged to think about them and to challenge the constructs of societal norms I’d grown up with.

I miss unpacking these texts, and I miss the exhausting follow-up discussions with some really brilliant people. I wish I’d have seen it then. Thankfully, there’s a bunch of intelligent people on this Internet doo-hickey. I hope they’ll challenge me in the same way. The way you did with post Charlie.