During my PhD I was lucky enough to meet a lot of inspiring people, at the Antwerp Management School (my workplace), but also within the group of people who were the subject of my research.
Creative entrepreneurs
I extensively interviewed many independent fashion and furniture designers, both famous and less famous, successful and less successful as designer. Interviewing them, I discovered that they all struggled to balance their artistic and business needs. Mostly they have to spend too much time exploiting their business, organizing PR activities and managing social media, instead of spending time on creating new designs and discovering new materials.
Furthermore, a lot of them had to combine their design job with another non-creative job. Being a creative entrepreneur can be very demanding… However, they still talked with a lot of passion and unlimited commitment about their design practice and wanted to persist in doing the thing they love most: designing.
One of my research conclusions was that these creative entrepreneurs can sometimes better ‘jump’ and start immediately as full-time designer, to avoid wandering around too long in the creative sector without knowing if there is s something in it for them.
Professional tensions
Also in the academic field, I see tensions between different jobs, opportunities and choices. What do I want to do after obtaining my PhD? Where do I go to? A few months after finishing my PhD, I also struggle(d) with these questions and tensions. Keeping my research population in mind, I decided to follow my passions.
In September, I will start part-time as a lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam; the other days of the week I will write project applications and conduct research projects as a postdoc researcher at the Antwerp Management School. I am curious to see how I will balance these two different jobs and countries, but I am really looking forward to it.