Nancy's University Story

For the second in our university series, we have Nancy who helps create the Lucy Loves This marketing content, Nancy also styles and shoots the product photography. Today she will be talking about her experience at Newcastle College to celebrate the new collection of prints that champion university towns, perfect for anyone who is set to graduate this year.

After initially thinking I wanted to go to Edinburgh to study graphic design my mum convinced me to give the Art & Design Foundation course at Newcastle College a try. Once I’d had some time to think about it I realised that I wasn't emotionally ready to move away from home so I decided to stick to my home town for one more year and give it a try!

For me, the foundation year was the perfect stepping stone from school (where I thought I was a grown up, but actually wasn’t) to living life alone for the fist time at uni. I felt like a small fish in a big pond the first few weeks as I had come from a very small secondary school - there were six people in my art class at A Level! I soon got used to the new routine and made some amazing friends.

Everyone there was so different, all ages, all backgrounds and all nationalities which was really refreshing as my secondary school was an all-girls school. I learnt so much about myself and how there are many different personalities in the world (not just mean posh girls!). I flung myself into the work, I felt like we were all given the opportunity to play and explore lots of different art forms which was so fun. There was no pressure, all we had to do was try out every discipline before choosing our specialist subject. I studied, fine art, illustration, ceramics, sculpture, textile design, fashion design, photography and graphic design. Graphic design actually ended up being the one course that I really didn't like so thank goodness I went for the foundation year after all!

I found that I had a huge passion and talent for textile design, which was something I had never studied before. This lead to me choosing it as my specialist subject and I studied it for the remaining 9 months of the course. I was awarded a distinction and then went on to study Printed Textiles and Surface Design at Leeds Arts University.

Without the foundation year course at Newcastle College, I may be stuck in a graphic design job at the moment. Now have my own interior styling brand and I also get to help out lovely designers like Lucy too!

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We would love to hear your own university tales so head over to our Facebook and Instagram accounts to leave a comment and join in the conversation.

Our full collection of uni town prints are available here if you'd like to purchase one for a recent graduate!