Meet Chase: designer, content creator, college dropout, and life-long learner

The word “learning” still sparks a very traditionalist image in most minds, one that is associated with young students in classrooms. But we know that learning doesn’t stop at any specific age. The world changes so fast — learning is our most important ability for thriving. 

Meet Chase - a content creator, design student, and college dropout based out of Inglewood, California. 

“Everyday I wake up. I ask, what am I trying to learn today?”

Besides being a full-time design student, Chase also enjoys: 

• Creating content on Linkedin
• His UX Design series with Asara, a UX Motion designer at Oracle, called “Too Much at Lunch”
• Another series with Jordan Brown named “Bro How Was Your Week” on mental wellbeing and reframing the word “Bro” beyond its association with toxic masculinity
  

Like most students in high-school, Chase was told that he needed to go to college and get a good job.

“I was fed a lie.”

When he got to college, Chase had a few key realizations:

1. “College was inappropriate for what I was doing because the general ed classes weren't what I wanted to do. It was just like a repeat of my senior year. It just seemed like a waste of time.”
2. “I wanted to get a job in the fire department. And I was already being recruited into the fire department process.”
3. When part b didn’t quite pan out, he was left thinking - “Why did I go to college? Did I really dedicate 18 years of my life to get into college and then drop out?!”
   

But Chase understood that being educated well is more so about mindset than about a physical institution. 

“As much as I talk down about the educational system, I am really, really passionate about learning. I am a student for life.” 

He shares that his immersive learning environment takes form in different places, both physical and digital. For example, Chase has an actual learning corner in his kitchen where he puts up conversation notes, book excerpts, and scraps from articles. 

He is also part of Edvo’s online learning community and talks about why collaborative learning is so important:

“I was fed this idea that entrepreneurship is lonely. So what excites me about this collaborative community was just that it's collaborative. That it’s normalizing learning together is and it's reframing what it means to be an entrepreneur, what it means to be a learner, what it means to be an employee, what it means to be a human.”

Chase shares why he found collaboration to be difficult initially: 

• In schools, we are pitted against our peers, the people we can be learning from, because of the “curve”
• To get further ahead, we have to “prove” that we are better than others so we don’t share ideas or questions 
• We are scared that intellectual property will be stolen if shared 
  

As Chase put it, “In order for changes to be made, there's going to have to be a lot of unlearning and relearning and reframing.”

Take a moment and ask yourself: 

• What am I currently focusing on?
• What is one thing I want to learn?
• What was my experience with education like? Would I change anything about it?
• Where and how do I learn best?
• What sort of support do I need to learn better?

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