Every year, right around the start of September, I get the same uneasy feeling.
It is not about summer ending or the general dread of going back to work. It is something more specific than that, and it took me four years of feeling it before I could actually name it.
It is not the fear of meeting new people either. I do not have trouble with that part. A close friend once told me, fairly accurately, that I can be outgoing when I want to be. What I am actually afraid of is specific: the first impression.
The new students understanding (or misunderstanding) of me in that first class, and the sense that whatever they decide in those first twenty minutes is going to stay fixed for the rest of the semester.
The things I assumed made a good first impression, the habits I leaned on to control how people saw me, might be exactly what work against me. Most of the time I cannot tell which one it is until it is already too late.
Assumption 1: Everyone thinks the way I do
We are all human, so we must all react to things more or less the same way, right?
Wrong.
Outside of the basic fact of being human, we are often working from completely different logic, and I still catch myself assuming otherwise when nobody has asked for my opinion.
Years ago I had a student in my design studio who was exceptional. Her work was strong, but what stood out more was how she prepared, showing up every class with a neat set of bullet points and sketches, questions she wanted to work through with me before we even got started.
She finished the semester with a high grade, and I assumed, without really thinking about it, that I would see her again the following term.
The thesis course ran two semesters, fall through spring, one continuous project. So when she did not register for winter, I was surprised. I later found out she had never planned on a design career at all. The course was just an elective she wanted to try.
How can someone work that hard and that well without planning to go anywhere with it?
My brain reached for the usual script, if I were her, I would have kept going. She was not me, though, and I am still not entirely sure what her work ethic was actually in service of. Maybe it was never about the career at all.
Assumption 2: Reading fast is the same as reading well
This one took longer to see, mostly because it is tied up in how I was trained.
Design education runs on quick visual judgment. You glance at a board, a layout, a presentation, and you are expected to form an opinion before there is time to read every line of text.
I got good at this. For a long time I assumed it was just a useful skill, not a bias with a blind spot.
Students in my course submit their work twice. First, they present it out loud, walking me through the project in person. Then, separately, they submit the full written document, everything spelled out.
A few times now, I have come away from a presentation convinced a project was about one particular idea, only to sit down with the full submission later and realize the actual emphasis was something else entirely.
One student, I remember, spent her whole presentation talking about material choice, and I nodded along assuming that was the project. The document told a different story, one mostly about circulation and how people would actually move through the space. Material barely came up.
For a while I told myself this gap was about students not communicating clearly enough out loud.
I am less sure of that now. I was reading the fast version because that is what I was trained to trust, and I do not think I have fully understood it, even writing this.
Assumption 3: Everyone shares my criteria for a good impression
Years before any of this, I learned a much more painful version of the same lesson, in a job interview.
I was unusually nervous for that one, more than the situation probably called for. Like most interview candidates, I wanted to project the obvious qualities, enthusiasm, confidence, preparation. Near the end, when the interviewer asked if I had anything to add, I told him, honestly, how much I wanted the job.
I did not get it. The rejection letter, when it eventually explained itself, used the word unprofessional.
At the time I could not understand it. My instinct was the same one from the classroom, if I were the interviewer, I would have picked the candidate who cared the most.
However, the interviewer was not me. What I read as enthusiasm, he read as a lack of composure, and the thing I had been coached to show was the exact thing that worked against me in that room.
There was no way to have known that going in, and honestly, I am still not sure there was a way to have known it after.
Final thought
None of this has made me stop caring about first impressions, and I am not sure it should.
The habit pushes me to over-prepare for almost everything, client meetings, teaching materials, even casual networking conversations. Clients tend to respond well to it, and a few of my longer working relationships probably started because of that first meeting going better than it had anticipated.
But I have stopped trusting the impression itself as proof of anything. It is useful, and it took me a while, along with one rejected job application, to stop treating useful as the same thing as reliable.
So here I am again, another September, still getting that same uneasy feeling before the first class. I know by now it will pass by week three, mostly because week three is when I finally read something a student wrote instead of just watching how they said it.
First impressions are not set in stone, they are just the first of many stones, and I have tripped over a fair number of them along the way.
Life Outside of Design Studio 