Do you remember believing? Do you remember when dragons were real and Lego spaceships could whizz outside your window and a plastic eyepatch was all you needed to become a pirate?
Child’s play, I know.
But wasn’t there something extraordinary about being convinced that there was something more, something secret, something beyond the everyday?
For children, magical worlds are easy to believe in. Imagining is simple, a natural reaction to sightings of hollowed logs and old tires and abandoned silos. As we grow older, imagination loses that simplicity. A mysterious, scribbled note dropped on the sidewalk becomes just another piece of trash. The locked door at the library that was once an entrance to Diagon Alley becomes nothing more than a supply closet. Faith in the extraordinary becomes indifference towards the ordinary.
But here’s a secret: we are the makers of magic.
I stopped making forts with my bedsheets a long time ago. Instead of spending my days as a pirate-astronaut-princess adventurer, I learned about algebra, five-paragraph essays and mitochondria. I still made things (power points, Sunday dinner) but the act of making had lost its power.
During high school, I treasured my bi-weekly doses of art class, and at Yale I’ve penciled in a few hours every week for painting, but it wasn’t until this summer that I rediscovered the exhilaration of making things.
A traditional education is mostly about understanding what has already been thought. You synthesize. You analyze. You distill. You ponder. You respond. You repeat.
Flashstarts is not a traditional education.
Every day here is eight hours of making things: designing graphics, coding data visualizations, mocking-up apps, animating characters, drawing stills for stop-motion videos. And it’s intoxicating.
This isn’t the ‘don’t-forget-to-bring-me-my-coffee’ type of internship. This is the ‘let’s-make-something-out-of-nothing, believe-in-possibility, forget-that-there’s-a-box-to-think-in’ type of internship.
I get to make things that other people will use and appreciate, which is even more satisfying than building sand castles and secret forts. I’ve figured out that programmers and designers and writers and artists have just as many magical powers as pirate-astronaut-princess adventurers. We still get to build castles in the sky from nothing but air and imagination. You type the right incantation on your keyboard, swish your finger across a touchpad, press pen to paper, pull paint across a canvas, and suddenly there is something that didn’t exist before. Magic is real, and it’s yours if you take the time to notice it’s there.
Position: Graphic Designer
School: Yale University, Class of 2016
