This is genius. Thank you so much for making this.

Work harder than everyone around you.

Don't stress about finding a job just keep making stuff with every spare second you have and eventually you will land something.

Go to events and art shows on a regular basis for inspiration.

Don't listen to what the cool kids say and work for free for friends and non-profits or companies that are really doing a good thing and have no money. This is how so many designers got their start and built early skills and a lot still do it in order to get into new industries or to learn new techniques or software they can't charge for yet. (Don't offer to work for free for a project that has a budget to win it over another designer, thats not what I'm talking about.)

Life is not fair, accept that as the designer on a team you'll end up doing tons of non-design related tasks that people on your team don't want to do in order to make your work successful or just get it out the door. Data entry, photo retouching, deck proofreading, etc, all of this stuff will fall on your shoulders from time-to-time. It's part of the job sometimes, if you don't do it nobody will and your work will suffer.

If they haven't assigned a copywriter to a project don't look at that as a negative but as an opportunity to brush up on your writing skills. That will be one of the most important skills you can improve outside of design. Never use lorem ipsum, just stop..think and write what you think the design should communicate. You already do that visually. Overtime you will get better which will make you a 10x better designer.

Collect really amazing design and copy it in your off time to understand what those designers were doing.

Your first 2-3 jobs will most likely be crazy shit-shows. Embrace it and soak up as much as you can. It's bootcamp for later opportunities.

All of it will pay off because if you work hard enough you'll never have to goto lame networking events and can work from your apartment in mesh shorts. Oh, and get paid to design things...Isn't that crazy? :)

hahaha

Oh, the curse of being a graphic designer.

Yikes, they sure don't make it easy for us.

But this is helpful, thanks!

Oh good call. Would be cool to digitize this content. Cool, but also ... painful. :)