When I was five years old, my mother decided to enroll me in a lot of extra classes with two arguments: first, to sharpen different abilities she wanted me to have in life. Second but most importantly, she wanted me to avoid the shyness I was displaying at an early age. I’m not sure if it was my mother’s lack of self-control or her constant doubts about what was best for me, but I took an overload of extra classes. It was like she signed me up for every activity in the city. Everyday after school, I was busy all afternoon with music, taekwon do, cooking, clay sculpting, arts and crafts, drawing, ballet, and some other classes that didn’t make it to the final screening of my memory. It was an important period in my life as I developed an interesting skill. I became one of those girls that could do almost everything, what you would call a multidisciplinary person. I became a person who likes to try new things and complements one thing with the other. As my father would say, a Renaissance woman. Besides that, I am one of those people who get bored quickly of the same thing, I’m blaming it on that experience too. I just can’t stand working mechanically. Maybe that’s why I chose advertising as my career, but that’s another story.

Now that I’m a senior two weeks away from graduation, my mind is focused on getting a job. I’m working on my resume, business cards, web page, and all those things the industry needs to see in order to trust your skills. The task became hard as hell, not because there are no jobs, there are actually a lot of opportunities. It is more that I don’t have a box to put myself in. My brain tells me that I’m good at this, but I’m also good at that, and I remember I’m good at that other thing, too. I enjoy playing different roles on a project and it's quite difficult to sell that. After all, when you are looking for a job you are trying to sell yourself to an employer. It seems like big agencies have clearly defined categories. They stipulate what skills you should have and what kind of person you should be on a certain job and that is my problem. How can I lock myself in definitions? Do I have to choose a box? What happens if I want to be mixed up a little bit? Making my way into the industry feels weird because as a multidisciplinary person, I feel I live in a single-minded world. I have to add that I’m writing from the artistic point of view I know, and the advertising industry I’m getting myself into.

It's not just my problem, I believe there's a whole generation feeling the same. This week, I read an article in AdWeek where Edward Boches calls this type of person the Hybrid Creative; there is a lot more that you can know about this “new generation” from that piece. From my experience, we are people who don’t want a job title because we can do the work of many titles. We may compensate this feeling with personal projects out of work, but wouldn’t it be nice for a company to acknowledge every skill her employee poses and to push her to gain more? For the time being, I will try to fit into a box until the world changes and job titles become old. Maybe it will be in a couple of years, maybe a decade. Who knows if the time will ever come.