1461 Days Apprenticeship

I’ve always loved converting big amounts of time into smaller pieces. Instead of thinking of a month as just a month, I would say 30 or 31 days (except February). Weeks become seven days, years become 365. And with bigger numbers, it somehow feels even cooler.

I think this weird little habit of mine comes from wanting to give each day a bit more importance. If someone tells you that something happened once in a year, it doesn’t sound like much. But say it was one day out of 365, and suddenly that one day, along with every other day around it, feels a little more important.

Enough philosophising. The reason I’m writing this is because on July 31st, I graduated from my four year apprenticeship at ETH Zürich as an Interactive Media Designer. Four years, or in this case, 1,461 days. And it got me thinking a lot over the last few days.

Not just about how much I learned, but about how much can actually change in 1,461 days.

You can become a completely different person. You meet people, lose people, make mistakes, discover things you never expected to care about, and have experiences you probably won’t even remember properly a few years from now.

Four years sounds like a long time, but when you look back, it somehow feels ridiculously short. It passed so fast. I still remember the first day I started at ETH, thinking, “Okay, these four years are going to take forever.” And suddenly I blinked, and I’m standing there holding my diploma, taking photos with my parents.

I probably can’t remember even half of those 1,461 days. But I don’t think that means they disappeared. Every day left something behind. A skill I learned, a mistake I made, a person I met, or simply a different way of looking at things.

Being able to work and study in a field I genuinely love was one hell of an experience. I wasn’t only dealing with school drama and tight deadlines, I was also solving real problems with my colleagues at work, working on actual projects, making mistakes, learning from them, and somehow trying to keep everything together at the same time.

And honestly, that was what made the whole ride so much fun.

For what’s to come, I’ll be staying at ETH for another year as an Interactive Media Designer, but this time I’ll also be coaching the new apprentices joining the team, as well as helping the ones who are getting ready to finish their own apprenticeships. And after, well, I’m still unsure, but for sure I look forward to it.

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As always, this is simply my perspective, and I’m here to share it with you.