The school is starting again, and my life at the University of the Arts London had already ended for 3 months. During the year in London, there were a lot of freshmen who were studying in high school and the university, asking me about their confusion of studying abroad and future career.
I may need to use tens of thousand words to write about how I choose my path. Today, let‘s talk about what I’ve learnt at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London with you.
Studying fashion= Becoming a fashion designer?
Not almost, but EVERYONE who heard that I’m studying fashion in LCF, they would always say: “Woah, so you will become a designer!” True, for most of the people, “learning fashion” equals to being an artist or designer, and that is one of the biggest reason that the Asian parents are forbidden their children from learning arts and fashion.
At least, this was the obstacle when I told my parents that I want to switch my path from political science to fashion; but,
Fashion is a comprehensive field of study, especially when LCF is an educational system specifies in fashion among the 6 colleges in UAL. Besides the courses of arts and design (of course, arts and design can be separated into fields of studies.), there are also classes about photography, fashion marketing, fashion retail management, journalism, cosmetic science, MBA, fashion buying and fashion psychology… What I was studying is about broad fashion management.
“Business management” is understandable, but when you say “fashion management”, it’s confusing
The MA courses in the UK last for a year. Due to the short period of time, we don’t choose our own class schedule, we were following the schedule provided by the course leader.
I only had 3 classes: fashion context, fashion retail management, and fashion communication. Well, sometimes we would also have a language class and the creative attribution lectures on Friday.
Be a responsible student, do your best of what you are told
3 classes, seems to be so easy to do. But, all of our classes have the independent courses to give the complete lectures in UAL The difficulty of our course, Fashion Management, is that we have to use one year to learn the knowledge designed for 3 courses. Because management is an all-inclusive study, we need to learn the overall functions and tasks in order to develop effective strategies for the company.
London College of Fashion positions themselves as an academy-oriented college; research method, research ethics and writing essays stood more than half of our study.
The purpose of writing these essays is to encourage our sensibility to the history and the development of the fashion industry. During this year, I have written these essays:
- Fashion contest- How to motivate consumers to buy?
- Fashion retail management- Using Porter’s value chain to compare luxury and fast fashion brand: Take DIOR and MISSGUIDED as example
- Fashion communication- Harrods 2019 spring promotion business plan
- Self-research essay: An XXX of how to adopt XXX science for Western luxury brands to XXX (This essay has not yet be published, I’d like to keep my research private.)
After writing so many words, I can obviously feel my progress and to know what I’m good at. In the beginning, I could only reference 12 papers to compose a writing; in the end, I could already reference up to 94 papers among 200 pieces of research efficiently.
Be intelligent, utilize the school resources
The teachers in LCF would not give much interference to the students. They wouldn’t set the progress and homework except for the deadlines. Usually, a week after the teacher announced the deadline, they would start caring about the difficulties that you were facing at this moment; however…
“Oh, I haven’t found suitable papers.” A lot of students would say so in the first week,
“It’s already been a week, and you haven’t started reading the paper? Will you be able to finish it? I think it’s quite risky.”
Plus, there were a lot of vacations and holidays in London, the time we spent on campus was less than I thought, Hence, if people are not willing to do the self-research outside of the course/ school and utilize the library; honestly, you wouldn’t feel like learning a lot of things here. I even had friends saying that they spent money on receiving not much tutoring.
One of the things that I’m thankful for my family is, they made me a person who wouldn’t want to keep traveling around Europe like collecting stamps. For me, what I can learn on campus and in London is already far than enough.
Why traveling so far to London when you can just search for everything on the internet?
But the biggest difference between Taiwan and Europe is that the later had already been cultivated under fashion for centuries, their resources for learning fashion are beyond us and people can absorb the knowledge by experience the environment.
I think part of the value of a school is depending on its library resources. Compared to other colleges, LCF has a mini library. But inside the library, you can find everything you need about fashion: PANTONE color forecasting and color code, the evolution of trench coat, uni-sex fashion, sustainable fashion, the code of the theatre costume design… they even have the collections that are valued thousand dollars.
To encourage me to utilize more of the library resources, I would meet up with my friend from other courses in the library every Wednesday, we are there to study and borrow books. We also loved to assist each other to find the books we need. In that way, we can exchange the idea of our on-going projects; sometimes, your friends could even provide you a different point of view.
Found the value of living abroad
The value of living in a foreign country needs to be created and found by ourselves. After growing up, no one would hold the resources to your face, telling you what to do and what to learn. We are the only one who is responsible for our future.
