AMVBBDO

On all the applications they ask you to put down your A Levels and GSCE scores. I went to school in the States so I don't have any of those things to fill in. Since the AMVBBDO application was a friendly word document and not a rigid online form I decided to include the courses that I studied at college in leu of A Levels and GCSE scores that I didn't have. Why did I do this? Well I took some amazing classes and I think the BS Visualization curriculum is pretty unique. Here are the classes that I took during four wonderful years at MCAD.

• Account Planning
  
• Advertising Account Management
  
• Advertising Design 1
• Biological Systems
• Colour Forecasting and Trends
  
• Creative & Critical Thinking
• Cultural Anthropology
• Cultural Institutions
• Design Context
• Experience Gestalt
  
• Flash Workshop
  
• Foundation 2-D
• Foundation 3-D
• Futures
• Graphic Design 1
• HTML
  
• Internships-7
• Introduction to Film
  
• Inventions and Progress
• Marketing Concepts & Analysis
• Mashing Up the Internet
• Persuasion & Negotiation
  
• Presentation & Debate
• Project Tracking
  
• Product Design
  
• Organizing Data Providing Information
  
• Reading for Ideas
• Screen Printing
  
• Senior Project
• Study Abroad Semester London
• Typography
• Understanding Contexts for Internet Communication
• Visual Thinking
• Visualizing Physics
  
• Visualization Studio

In the application form I did put this into a nice neat table instead of long list. I could throw some code in here..maybe later. I enjoyed this application, the questions were straightforward and fun to answer. I talked about the Museum of Childhood Advert. Media channels that I couldn't live with out Print, Radio, Internet. A photo of something that makes me feel happy would have to be from my Las Vegas Elvis impersonator wedding. The business question was a bit of a stumper. To be honest I am not in the market to open my own business. Should I have gone with my gut and said I would love to just work for myself braiding hair on the beach in Mexico? Anything else we should know about you was answered by telling them I was briefly in a tap dance troupe in Minneapolis. The usual.

An interesting fact is that my Advertising Account Management class was taught by Glen Sherling former Senior Vice President - Director of Client Services of BBDO Minneapolis. The class was split up into two parts the first was with Glenn and we would have class at BBDO. That was really cool. For the second half we worked with Shawn Judge on presentation skills. Shawn Judge is an amazing speaker and storyteller. We worked with her for six weeks learning how to speak and give presentations.

I remember giving a speech in that class that went over like a lead balloon. The point of the presentation was to teach the audience something. I had just got done reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" and was going to share his three step method for eliminating worry. We were also supposed to define what kind of audience we would ideally be presenting to. My audience was ideally an incoming freshman class.

I gave the speech in a very dramatic style, imagine an evangelical preacher on speed and that was what I was going for. I must point out that although we got to say who the ideal audience was, in reality we were giving the speech in front of five other students. Ultimately they were the audience, something I neglected to address. There was one guy in the class who was from Germany, who told me afterwards how much he hated my speech and that I should never do that again. I will admit that perhaps the theatrics didn't go over so well, it was like I said a group of five other students so I didn't really need the clip on microphone. Lessons learned, eh? I also decided to chalk up the fact the German foreign exchange student didn't like the speech because he had no cultural context for that style of speaking. To be fair he didn't really even know what salsa was.. I digress..

image credit-Pony/flickr