Interior Design Education vs. Real World Experience

An Intern’s Perspective
By Brooke Williams, Summer Intern with Lovelace Interiors

An education in Interior Design is a mix of excitement, countless changes, sweat, and tears during college studio courses and real life experience. In school, we learn the technicalities of design: standard sizes of furniture, clearances around furniture, codes for various building types and occupancies, rendering the colorful details of your design, and computer generations- just to name a few! Days, late nights, weeks, and/or months are spent coordinating everything you have learned in previous and current studio courses, into a semester-long project. There usually isn’t a budget to work within or an actual client with their particular taste and style. Even though it’s hard work and we learn from our design mistakes, the studio experience can’t begin to measure up to the knowledge we’re expected to know in the real world.

        The real world brings more to the table, real projects and real experience. Budgets exist with every project and short time constraints could be a possibility. We actually have to make the time schedules and contracts that we learned about in our design business courses. We have to learn about furniture, fabric, lighting and accessory lines. Most importantly, you have to be able to sell your design, merchandise, and yourself to your clients. The only way to learn about all extents of the design world is experience, and experience requires time. We can’t “know it all” in a year, or two years, or even three for that matter. Experience is gained by learning from each and every project and client; walking away from the project with more wisdom and knowledge than before. Learning from designers who already have experience and time under their belt, could prove to be influential as well! So here’s to the real world experiences and taking each project one day at a time while giving them all we have!