Digging Deeper for Personal and Professional Growth

Alex Martens (‘21), former collegiate softball player, describes her experience as a Master of Arts in Strategic Design student, the unexpected challenges, and the positive personal outcomes that came with it. Here is an insight into Martens’ interview about her personal growth throughout the program:

What stood out to you most about the MASD program?

I want to touch on something that I felt was super eye opening for me in this [Furman MASD] program because I come from a small town in cornfields in the Midwest, and then I went to college in Kentucky in the south of the Midwest, but my eyes had never been opened up to the types of conversations that we would have in strategic design classes. 

It was the first time that I was talking about really hard topics that, in my public university, we never talked about. Hearing everybody’s personal experiences and how they related to their projects and seeing how projects from an inner, emotional, vulnerable state turned into these physical beautiful pieces was super eye opening. 

A lot of growth happened for me throughout this program. I was able to become vulnerable for the first time. My first year of this program I cried at least every day because I was fighting through not really showing a vulnerable side of me. I went from being an athlete, to a vulnerable, emotional, yet a smart and intelligent and deliberate designer. It was a whole lot of self-improvement throughout this year and a half. 

Every class, we were all going through therapy. I was doing projects on mental health and the athletic world while also doing projects on personal growth and what I want in the future. I had a therapist I paid for, but I almost stopped seeing her because I’d go to class and it was therapy.

I think that there’s the opening up aspect of it, but there’s also this creative thrust to opening up. You’re not just opening up, you’re opening up in a way that’s constructive, in a way that builds something and creates something people will understand. It’s sharing your feelings and what you are experiencing in a physical form that other people will understand, which is so hard to do. Because perspective is such a construct in everyone’s mind. Everyone thinks differently. Everyone sees differently. Everyone understands the world differently. So it’s about really diving into: “how can we make somebody or a group of people see what I’m seeing?”

How do you feel that your experiences in the program affected you?

As an athlete, we have the genetic makeup of discipline, leadership and communication. 

I’ve done so many interviews, talked to so many different people and expressed viewpoints on diverse topics. But, the one thing I never talked to anybody about was what was happening inside. I only talked about what they wanted to hear, about what’s happening out there, right? I talked about what happened in the game. I talked about what’s happening on the team. I talked about what’s happening in the community, but I never talked about what’s happening inside.

Learning to do that was extremely hard. Ross really pushed me to do it. I think that was the one thing Ross told me was about vulnerability, and that was the thing I held with me for so long. 

All my projects started to shift from these very surface level subjects, such as, “I’m an athlete girl. I played sports. I can do stuff about the NCAA.” Now I’m gonna do a project about skin care because I suffered from chronic acne my whole life. I’m also going to do a project on hair care because I really think it needs to be projected more on how beautiful (African American) hair is and how we need to talk about that more. 

I think we need to talk about a lot of different things, and I dug into my soul and my brain regarding what I actually see in the world instead of what people wanted, thought I saw, or what I should have seen. 

If you’d like to know more about how to enroll in Furman’s Master of Arts in Strategic Design program, please visit our website.