As a student of the Design Management course at YACademy in 2025, I would like to share aspects not so much related to the program itself, or even to the technical knowledge it shared. Instead, I prefer to highlight the intangible elements, some of which are related to personal reflections.
When stepping into the professional world, one often sets aside those qualities that truly distinguished us during our university years. — Which software can you use? How many years of work experience do you have? — these are the questions we worry about answering. To be honest, for those of us belonging to “Gen Z”, learning new software is almost an everyday practice. All it takes is the right attitude and some familiarity skills that, in a way, our generation has absorbed since birth.
Much more complex and valuable, however, are the transversal skills, the ones you cannot pick up from an online course or prove with a certification. I’m referring to work ethics, communication abilities, or critical thinking. If I had to define which notions or competences I personally strengthened during the Design Management course, I would point precisely to these.
I also cannot hide the personal rediscovery of a theme I deeply care about, and which was well passed on by some of the lecturers: the relationship between humans and nature. Entire pages of a magazine would not be enough to write about this connection, so I will limit myself to only mentioning it here, as it’s not the main focus of this reflection.
Returning to the experience itself, I would like to share a narrative born from a collective brainstorming session of a work team I was part of, an exercise we titled “Linfa” — from the Latin lympha, meaning water — a symbol of vital energy, flow and connection.
YACademy is like a path, a dense network of connections. It is a lymphatic system where each student represents a single water molecule circulating within it and which, as part of the system, contributes to defining it.
All the molecules together form the fluid, that sap which flows, that begins to follow this path, reshaping it and creating new ones.
At the same time, as this water flows, the properties of the molecules change, just as in a lymphatic system, enriching themselves with knowledge, competence, and new journey mates with whom to share wisdom through different channels.
The parallel between the collective and the individual is evident; the system works if each molecule finds its own space and strengthens its own structure. What every institution devoted to spreading knowledge must have is the ability to create the best possible conditions for each individual who takes part. Here the molecule is the building bricks of all connections, and each individual grows in order to become part of a greater collective.