Edinburgh Napier University

Could you please tell us your name and the course you are studying?  

My Name is Brianna and I am studying MSc Creative Advertising.

How are you and your classmates preparing for the degree show?  

For the degree show, we've essentially been working on briefs since the fall time. We are allowed to just put our projects that we're most passionate about at the Degree show. It might be something from the D&AD new bloods. We've also had the opportunity to go to an agency and do real life campaigns for them. So there is going to be a lot of variety of work that will be shown there and it should be pretty unique for each individual.   

What kind of projects are students working on?

Well, there's been such a broad range of work that I'm excited to be able to show a lot of campaigns from just completely different industries in different parts. So we've worked on beverage briefs, nonprofit and kind of NGO work and stuff for the Scottish government. So I think there's just such a broad range of creative work that we'll be able to showcase and I'm excited to be able to display the variety of things that we've been able to work on.

Why do you think working together is important for degree show?  

I think the collaboration aspect of the course is really awesome. It's given me the opportunity to be able to work with every single one of my classmates and I think that there's a big advantage of being able to just learn from the people that are around you. So it's cool that all the projects that we'll be showcasing and it will kind of be in conjunction with each other so we can all speak to that experience of working together.

How has the journey been so far?

I think there's going to be so much camaraderie. We've all agreed that we're all going to be going out together to celebrate. So I think we all have been able to be together each step of the process. It is really cathartic to be going through that together.

How your teachers have helped you to prepare for the degree show?

I think that it's been great that throughout the year our professor has been inviting people from the industry to come in week by week. And it's nice that we already have familiarity with these faces and that they'll be coming back around to reignite those conversations again and to just to meet new faces, to meet past faces and show them how much we have grown from when they maybe first saw us in the first trimester to the work that we've been able to come up to till the end of the year.

How would you compare yourself from first year to final year?

I can see my growth in the amount of challenges I have faced and how I've been trying so many new things. Just going from the stage of doing research and strategy to then being able to do creative execution is a huge journey. And I think we've all grown in a lot of ways from the way we started when we first started. From just doing research and ideating to all the way to seeing something come alive and just seeing the full process of it coming together and yeah, definitely we will be able to see that at the degree show.

What is your view on the degree show?

I think it's been really fun. I think Edinburgh has a good creative scene anyway, so there's inspiration that can just be taken from being in the city itself. And the UK and Scottish advertising scene is really good, so we have been able to get a lot of inspiration from the agencies and the professionals we have been able to meet, as well as just learning from each other as peers. So it's been a super fun process and I'm really excited about all the work that's came in that we've been able to touch and even just the work that's to come. 

Do you think the projects are unique?

Yeah, absolutely. I think something that's really unique is that there's going to be work that reflects Scotland, but then work that reflects the rest of the world too because a lot of these campaigns are about solving real world problems. And it's cool to see something that we might be solving that affects Edinburgh specifically, but then something that could be for the UK as a whole, or even other parts of the world. So I think it's really cool to think about creative projects locally and then also on a global scale as well.

What is so exciting about the degree show?

For the Degree show, I think that I'm just most excited to meet a lot of new faces and see a lot of the same faces that have kind of stopped by and shown up at our course throughout the time. And also, I think something that's really special is spending a full year working super hard on tons of different projects and then getting to see that all come to life and getting to talk it through people who haven't seen it for the first time. Because we've all just been kind of working on this together in our room in F15. And then to just see it be brought to life in a completely different space with a whole new crowd of people I think is a really rewarding aspect of the course.