Creative Careers Evening

Creative careers cover a massive range of professions and industries, and this was abundantly clear at the Creative Careers evening held on Tuesday this week.

Over seventy pupils, from across the school, and their parents, joined our seven amazing guest speakers to hear about their journey through the creative world. OC and former Head Boy Chris Munns talked about his journey since leaving Caterham to becoming an architect and designing his own house extension. His journey did not go quite to plan and he faced a number of challenges in order to reach his goal and advised that pupils should never give up in the pursuit of their dreams.

Parent Ruth Smoker, also talked about making mistakes and the importance of learning from them when Reiss, the company where she is Head of Production and Sourcing Menswear, underestimated the popularity of a particular McLaren branded item of clothing. She talked about the need to be agile in the workplace in order to find solutions to deal with aspects that don’t quite go to plan.

OC Caroline Bowen-Long, an interior designer also discovered how small the world can be, when a parent mentioned that the office they worked in was actually designed by the company Caroline works for. We were also surprised to see how integral the use of computer aided drawing (CAD) is, not only in the field of architecture but also in the fashion world. OC Jess Puntan, formally a knitwear designer at Paul Smith and now designing sportswear at Rapha, brought along one of her design portfolios and it was quite eye-opening to see the uniformity of her designs using CAD – gone are the messy design books of the past!

Thank you too to Haime and Butler for stepping up at the last minute to send Nikki Saunders, one of their graphic designers along when my original contact had to pull out. We were also very lucky to have a Teams talk from Lindsay Pressdee, a senior lecturer in fashion marketing and branding at the University of Manchester and former course leader at BCU, who was grilled by Mrs Veldtman about her specialism, the creative industries in general and how pupils can prepare for this very competitive world.

Another popular speaker was parent Carlos Lutterbach, who delighted his audience with some wonderful clips of the animations he has worked on and how these amazing films get to a finished product from the original idea, through a storyboard and finally to the product we actually see. Carlos, like many of our other speakers also reinforced how superb these evenings are for networking and building up connections with people who might be able to support a pupil’s journey into these fields, as many business cards and contact details were traded with offers of advice and work experience opportunities.