Collaboration, Planning & Critical Attitude

Organization and planning have always been quite consistent in my trajectory. Nevertheless throughout my development as an Industrial Design student at TU/e I have learned about the importance of organization, conciseness and order in my work due to the short course durations and to manage tight deadlines with a wider time flexibility. I realized that working in a group does make me more disorganized due to the difference in work dynamics, which marked a turning point in group work and tried to set both internal and external deadlines at the beginning of a course or project. Nonetheless working with other people made me realize that projects never work out the exact way you plan to, and that I should be more open, relaxed and flexible when approaching a design process. Furthermore, in team settings I tend to come out as having a strong personality and am not afraid to show what I like and dislike. Once again, I need to be more flexible and open about other ideas and perspectives.

In terms of organization and planning, I have further refined my naturally structured approach. While I recognize that my communication with TU/e could have been more consistent during this period, I have made significant efforts in documenting and recording. For instance, using an internship logger to track my daily actions and reflections has transformed what used to be a chaotic design flow into a transparent, controlled process. This high level of documentation is a practice I highly value and will carry forward to ensure clarity in all future projects. I plan to adopt this process for my FBP as it resulted to be very successful in my internship outcomes. I will use either Miro or Word to track every task I do on a daily basis.

A key realization in year 2 was the importance of motivation and proactivity to learn within this bachelor. I recognized this was a weakness of mine, as I tend to prefer deadlines, set tasks and theory rather than the freedom of self-directed learning, which looking back I see how my lack of motivation in some courses has led me to earn less valuable outcomes from them than I hoped, regardless of the fact that every elective I took was related to my vision. Nonetheless, this realization made me attempt to adopt my mindset to be more proactive and learn things for myself. My choice in gaining internship experience was a positive pivotal change for me- I currently consider to be very independent, proactive and motivated to learn, and much more flexible to questioning and embracing new design choices I did not come up with or could potentially clash with my initial beliefs. I am experiencing growth by the day and am enthusiastic about beginning my Final Bachelor Project.