I am in my final year of a dual Bachelor of Business (Marketing) and Bachelor of Interactive Design at QUT, where the design school is ranked first in Queensland and where I have been awarded the Executive Deans' Commendation for Academic Excellence.
People do not always see how those two things connect. I did not either, at first. The further I got into both, though, the more they folded into the same question: who is this for, and what do they actually need? Marketing asks it so a campaign lands with the people it was built for. Interactive design asks it so a prototype does what those same people came to do. Same question, asked at different ends of the process, and once I could see that the two stopped feeling like separate degrees.
I started because making things was fun and the reasoning arrived later. Two things made it stick. A lot of what I grew up seeing was not built for people who look like me or eat like my family, and Sun & D came straight out of that: sun safety advice written around fair skin, rebuilt in four languages with the community it was actually for. The other is that this is a field where you eventually find out whether you were right, which I like far more than I expected to.
What I took from the internship was less about production and more about evidence. Making something is the easy part. Knowing whether it worked, and being able to say why, is the part that takes discipline. Running trial reels taught me to change one thing at a time, and to be honest when the result came back flat.
Next I want an in-house brand or content team, somewhere I can go deep on one audience instead of splitting across three. An agency would not put me off, and the internship was good practice for that pace, but the work I am proudest of came from knowing a brand well enough to argue with it.
Further out I want to be a CMO, and I say it plainly because it changes what I do now. That job needs strategy, measurement, craft and product sense at the same time, so I would rather gather those on purpose than specialise early and try to backfill later. The gap I am most aware of today is measurement at real scale, which is the part of the internship I only saw the edge of.
