Landing my first job in advertising and feeling luckier than most, I had certain delusions. I’d change the industry from the ground up, I thought. After all, I majored in advertising, so I thought myself adequately-equipped to handle anything thrown at me. It took one week of non-stop deadlines and nervous breakdowns to prove me dead wrong. 

Anyone who leaves university with wide eyes and wider expectations is in for a rude awakening. It takes a while to get your footing, but as said by mindfulness writer Jon Kabat-Zinn, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” So from one beginner surfer to another, here’s what I wish I knew ahead of time going into advertising. 

You only really learn by doing. It’s obvious when you think about it, but it only clicks when you can’t feel the floor under your feet. It’s the difference between learning the front crawl through a lecture and having to swim to shore for dear life. Even then, teachers can give projects, but at the end of the day, underperforming only gets you a bad grade, an emotional slap on the wrist, and a healthy dose of “is this course right for me?.” University was a safety net with low expectations and stakes.

Only one of my professors truly understood this, giving us multiple brain-taxing deliverables every week for 4 months. He broke us down day after day, and was quick to tell us how bad our work was. On our final day of class, he said “you only really learn by doing.” Some felt it didn’t justify the stress, myself included, but now I can’t help but be annoyed at how right he was. 

Specialize in not specializing. You don’t need to be a swiss army knife of a person to find success in advertising, but it’s a role that demands a lot. If you’re like me, you left school with a firm grasp of what you excelled at and where you fell short, thinking you could just hyperfocus on the former. It can get you far, but it’s not the only way to go about things. 

When your mind is open to working outside your comfort zone, doors that would otherwise be slammed shut inevitably open. Excelling is a bonus– but understanding as many facets of a project as you can, getting a sense of how the cogs in a machine work together, has value in itself. Expect to be asked to do more; enjoy the chaos, treat new tasks as opportunities, and try to enjoy them wholeheartedly. 

Your input is ALWAYS valid. Working in ads will put you in rooms with absurdly clever people, some with superhuman minds that can do what you do in a tenth of the time. It’s hard to imagine they would need input from someone new, but you’d be surprised how often they ask, and how often it helps. 

Above all else, advertising is an industry of ideas, and even the best of the best could always use other ideas to jump off of. Who knows, maybe that one idea you thought was too stupid could blossom into something truly great? Ideas are only wasted when they stay in your head, so always voice them out.

Being a new person in any field is hard; I’ve not been anywhere else at this point, but I suspect advertising is a different beast. It will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But in the end, everyone is all in it together, and working with people you can trust makes the job bearable. In the end, the moments that break you down are what forge you into a better person, so when faced with an imminent tsunami of work, just learn to enjoy it, and ride the wave.

Charles Maitland-Smith is a Junior Editor and Copywriter for IXM. With an affinity for writing, music, and all things sugar, he hopes to accomplish great things that will, eventually, fill out the rest of this bionote.