Portfolios 102: How Are You Selling Yourself?

Are you a student getting ready to graduate, or a young professional going through a job hunt, and have questions, concerns, and confusion about putting your portfolio together? What makes a ‘good’ portfolio? How do you present your work in a way that is compelling and will set you apart from the hundreds of other portfolios in this hiring cycle? How can you own your own success, and what does it mean to “be memorable”?  

With over 25 years of experience in the Themed Entertainment industry and 15 of those years recruiting students every Spring, Dave Cooperstein has seen all shapes, sizes, and types of portfolios, filled with all kinds of crazy content. A postcard portfolio that folds out to a wall poster? Dave’s seen it. A DIY boat built in a garage? Check. A logic flow chart by a computer scientist/filmmaker/architecture graduate student who built his own website for curating custom movie content? Yep.

Join Dave for a deep dive into understanding what not to do when putting your portfolio together, the questions you should be asking yourself, and plenty of example pages from real portfolios that he’s collected over the years. And then Dave will be joined for a Round Table Discussion by Themed Entertainment veterans Nicola Rossini and Joe Garlington, who spent decades developing iconic themed entertainment experiences at places like Disney and Universal, and have spent years working with and advising students getting ready for a job search.

Finally, you’ll have a chance to ask these three industry stalwarts questions about how to present your design process, what makes you different, and why filling your portfolio with plans, sections, elevations, and the dreaded ‘little tiny diagram’ isn’t such a great approach. You’ll walk away from this session with a better understanding of how to re-think your approach to selling who you are and why they should hire you.