My creative agency ambitions started taking shape in the late 90s.

It took a couple of years of mixing up test tubes, scorching eyebrows and an honest mishap involving a centrifuge and vial of radioactive isotopes that had other students and geiger counters screaming, that I realised a career in Biotech probably wasn’t for me.

I needed something a little less left-brain. Something less prescriptive. And less deadly. Something more creative, that celebrated and encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, instead of quietly cursing it through carbon-reinforced hazmat suits. I had to find a job in which the more outlandish, questionable, or just generally unmentionable experiences a person had in life, the better they were at it. A job that welcomed people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. People full of ideas.

Advertising beckoned.

I swapped my lab coat for a candy-coloured computer and did a course in visual communication. Then, in 2003, after working for a few years as a graphic designer in an ancient bicycle shop that had been semi-refurbished into a small ad agency, I discovered AWARD School.

The AWARD School website promised the best creative course, by the best creative people, to make you the best creative person, to get you the best creative job. I didn’t know what any of that meant. But what leaped out at me was that this course was all about ideas. I signed up.

A few months, hundreds of screwed up balls of paper and a small forest worth of chewed pencils later, I found myself standing in front of a room full of other people who wanted the best creative job, being handed a certificate for having had the best ideas.

Winning the AWARD School course meant I no longer had to share an office with rusting bicycle parts. One day, Clemenger BBDO called. They asked if I wanted to go and work there. As a creative. I still didn’t know exactly what that meant.

But I said yes.