You can take the students out of SCA but.. By @Laura_Amelia_
By Laura Magee
You can take the students out of SCA but..
There’s one thing for sure, to a average person, advertising and our school looks very peculiar from the outside in.
When placed in ‘normal’ environments, us idea finders, are faced with a series of hurdles that can sometimes be highly embarrassing.
You only have to sit in a library and start scamping, when someone walks past, peers at your work and sees an A4 sheet of paper with a drawing of a stick man holding a garlic bread shaped flute. This is a very normal thing for us to see on a piece of paper. But not to others and it’s not hard to assume that they:
- think you’re mental age is a single digit
- wonder – surely no academic subject requires such ambiguity?!
- question if you are Benjamin Button
- assume you’ve been on drugs
- she can’t be doing art surely? Then again art is very varied.
- see the sharpie and ponder whether the fumes fuelled this.
*5 minutes goes by and they walk past again thinking*
a) omg.. there’s more
b) is that a full trees worth of bizarre drawings?
c) What is she doing?
d) Weird.
But that’s not it. More situations and conversations arise…
My friends at university spend days working hard on a 1,500 word essay and I have to explain us SCAers spend days working hard searching for the right 3 words for a line.
We take pictures of adverts and sometimes even have selfies with them. Most people don’t even look at them.
We ask people what keeps them up at night without realising that the response could be interpreted very differently.
No matter where we are, who we are with or what we are doing, if we have a thought, it’s like Bernard’s watch has been pressed. Everything freezes and we can’t continue unless we’ve got our notepad out and wrote our thoughts down incase we forget them.
(They’re usually words you would have never seen placed together before e.g. Pritt Stick & hummus. It’s like a kind of language that doesn’t make sense without a visual or verbal explanation.)
There also a lot of advertising lingo that can easily be mistaken for other things, for example ’I’ve got some great briefs for you’. And having to explain that ‘copy writing’ is not preventing music from being used without permission.
Regardless of these experiences we battle through, hoping and believing that no matter how weird our work may look, it’ll provide a more enjoyable conversation than any mathematical theory will ever be.
All in all the slight embarrassment is worth it. Deep down, it’s probably one of the funniest and strangest jobs on the planet.
