ALLAN MACDONALD

For a long time whilst I was studying in high school my intention was to become a graphic designer.  For many reasons however this prospect did not excite me, but at the time I could not see any other options.  I still remember the exact moment it occurred to me that I could link my enjoyment of designing and drawing, with my love of all things automotive.  I was at school, and for some reason or another was doodling a car when the idea came to me that somebody must actually have to do this for a living.  I started looking into the possibilities of this straight away since my graduation from high school was less than a year away.  Very soon I discovered the Transportation Design course at Coventry University.  I read all I could about the course, and phoned the University to find out more about what I would be required to show in my folio to have a chance of being accepted.  It was obvious that competition would be fierce since (at the time) it was the only school in the UK offering an undergraduate transport design course.  I knew my folio would need a lot of work, as at the time it was virtually empty.  I decided the best thing to do would be finish school and take a year out to work on building a body of work suitable for getting into Coventry.  I enrolled in as many sketching and drawing night classes as I could, even if these had nothing to do with design.  I have always been able to draw, I knew however that to stand a chance I would have to make sketching and drawing second nature.  As well as the classes I set myself design projects constantly.  I had been told by the lecturers at Coventry that an important part of your folio is that it shows you can think across a wide range.  By setting projects I was able to motivate myself to sketch constantly, as well as build a folio that had structure and showed that I was able to come up with wide and varied ideas.

Very quickly the time for the interview at Coventry arrived.  I travelled from Scotland with my parents and we all had a look around Coventry with me mentally trying to guage what it would it would be like to live there.  At the time I was not really that impressed.  Coming from the countryside meant that city life seemed a bit to depressing at first (my first few months at university soon showed me otherwise).  The interviews were very quick and informal, based around you talking through your folio and what you hope to achieve in the future.  It was the waiting afterwards that took forever.  Needless to say I got accepted, and was told that one of the reasons was that my folio showed a good range of ideas and thinking.