First Year at Srishti
2013 began with my first design workshop in Bangalore and ended with me enrolled at Srishti, the school I had dropped a year to get into.
I had pictured an open-ended program, one that handed me the responsibility to choose my own projects and courses. The reality was narrower. Mandatory core courses took most of my time and left little for anything else. It took me a while to grant that the cores had a point, that they were there to show us the different schools of thought, even if the pace meant I absorbed them slowly.
What I had not expected was the sheer amount available at Srishti. It became obvious that a year, maybe even two, would not be enough to understand what designing actually was. I still struggled to find the depth I wanted in some of the work. But the people surprised me. They were gentler in how they worked, and it was genuinely inspiring to watch the range of things my peers were chasing.
The thing I valued most was the room for independent learning, where you took charge of what you studied. That was the part that changed how I saw the year. I had come in wanting a structure to push against, and left having learned to be more open instead.