Success Story: Manushi Kaushik (New Media Design, NID)

Hey people,

I am Manushi, will be joining New Media Design Batch 2018 at NID.

First of all, I want to thank Prasanna sir for all the guidance and support.

He is the greatest mentor you will ever need for this journey.

My Background

I am a B.Tech graduate in Electrical Engineering from YMCAUST, Fbd.

Got campus placement and worked at VOLTAS for 2 years. 

Resigned from the job last year and did a scholarship residency program at Germany as an interaction designer.

Preparation

So, I had failed attempts before getting here and realized that my approach for the exam was wrong. I prepared for previous attempts by locking myself in a room and just practising though I did not leave any topic but still was not able to crack. On retrospective, I realized the reason for failure was my wrong approach. The only thing you need to do for preparation is get going, meet people and be as much aware as you can.

I jotted down these 3 main areas to work on for preparation- 

1. Design Thinking/Process

This I felt was most important and kind of difficult to understand as it can not be learnt in a day by reading just literature.

So, for this, I took part in various national level design/ innovation/prototype competitions, went to design camps, did hackathons and stuff. And brainstorming there really helped to understand the design process and also have hands-on experience on it.

I strongly recommend the aspirants to go to these places since you will be meeting more creative people and innovations happening around will boost your ideation process.

Also projects you do there help you while making the portfolio.

2. Sketching

Now here, especially all NON- arts/design/architecture or any related field graduates you need to remember that you will be competing with people who have studied sketching for 4/5 years, so your natural strokes have to be fully practised.

So this time while preparing I, fortunately, got a fine arts graduate who taught me sketching from scratch the way he learned in his college. And it did polish my natural strokes to a good extent.

But I absolutely agree with people for whom self-practice is sufficed..it is totally a personal choice based on your skillset.

3 GK and Aptitude

For GK..all the links and material in this blog, Manorama year book, daily newspaper, online articles on design..the more you read the better.

For Aptitude, I purchased General aptitude books from market available for other competitive exams like bank exam etc. just to stay in touch with basic reasoning and maths problems.

Portfolio and Interview

From my past failed interview experience I realized I will be competing with the best in different fields so portfolio really need to stand out from projects to presentation to everything.

Prasanna sir helped me a lot in compiling projects and also adding new stuff for versatility. It did help a lot in the interview.

For the interview I was just as true as I could be, most of the interview was about my previous projects. They asked mainly about the whole design process behind the solution and why I made that particular product.

So after this whole experience, all I can say is don't prepare for this exam keeping in mind fixed syllabus and topics but work on your own self as a designer and explore as much as you can. You can not afford to leave any stone unturned. Go through all the links and material in this blog thoroughly and read as much as you can.

This surely is a beautiful journey.

All the best