“Good luck with your exams!” A perfectly normal thing to say just before the exam period. Yet chances are you’ll hear an Industrial Design (ID) student reply: “I don’t have exams. I do have deadlines.”

Many of those deadlines come just after the holidays. This means that, like other TU/e students, most ID students didn’t really get a chance to recharge during the Christmas break. No matter how badly they needed it after all the long days and stress of finishing their prototypes and presentations for the so-called “demo day” just before Christmas.

Some ID students do have exams, by the way: first-year core courses such as calculus and physics, or courses they take outside their department. But even those who didn’t have to hit the books over the holidays were busy. They were wrapping up all the deliverables that have to be submitted for assessment during the exam weeks, such as the report, which still has to incorporate all the feedback from demo day. For soon-to-be graduates, there’s also the portfolio on top of that.

The most dreaded part is the reflection that every student has to write: what did I learn during this project or course, what went well, what went wrong, how do I diplomatically describe that the group work once again didn’t run smoothly at all, and how has what I learned contributed to my professional identity, my vision, and my learning goals?

For many students, it’s a component they would rather skip. But ask alumni, and they often say that the reflective skills they developed this way are extremely valuable in the workplace.

The same goes for many of the other deliverables. Together, they form part of the overall competency assessment of Industrial Design students. In addition to attitude, knowledge, and technical skills, instructors use them to assess professional skills such as communication, teamwork, planning, and organization.

Exams or not, the end of the semester also demands lots of hard work from ID students. Not to mention the professors.

Annemarie van Malsen is a communications officer at TU/e’s Department of Industrial Design. The views expressed in this column are her own.

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.