Living & studying abroad

For the entirety of my first semester I had the opportunity to live and study in Norway, more specifically Oslo. Aside from the cold extremes and almost borderline illegal prices for a pint, the time I spent there was extremely valuable as I had the chance to improve my social networking skills and also my knowledge and ability within the design world.

Being thrown into a completely new environment both physically and socially, meant that I started off slow. Leaving behind pretty much everyone and everything I'd gotten accustomed to over my first year at uni, only to have to restart all that again in a country where I was considered a foreigner; it was a strange feeling to say the least.

Fortunately for me I already had somewhat of a head start by having two of my friends with me in the same boat, meaning we were all as confused to begin with as each other. But once the ball got rolling with the first initial brief things went onwards and upwards from there. We'd made some friends within the class and sourced a couple of local coffee shops to keep our caffeine needs fulfilled and in one of the world's largest coffee consuming countries it was hard to stay away.

With the way the system worked at the university, it meant that we studied with 3rd year students all ranging from the ages of about 21-26. Most of which also had completed one or two internships during their studies giving them a wide knowledge base on design and an increased confidence within their work. I feel this definitely somewhat rubbed off on me during my studies as I'd not long finished my first year of uni. Having only really just started getting to know the industry and starting to improve my skills within design, I felt I started the semester off not all too confident with my work. But over the course of the 4 months studying there with a range of culturally different students and tutors, it gave me a lot of confidence within my skills and the work I produced from the two briefs. Although over the years of doing graphic design I feel my work has improved each year, as that normally is the case with most people, I think that I even made a huge jump within just those couple of months giving me a much more thorough approach to design from start to finish.