Students That Freelance

The student freelancer population is growing every year as students are nearing graduation and wanting to make a career for themselves. Recent grads also find themselves in a position where their best career move is to become a freelance designer. No matter what situation you are in, your portfolio will literally make or break you. Here is a handfull of great student portfolio websites for inspiration and motivation to get your portfolio in tip-top shape!

I don’t know about you, but my fall semester--the busiest of my collegiate career--will begin two weeks from today. Where did summer break go? If you are like me, chances are you spent most of your summer working on freelance projects and building your business. Kudos to you my friend! But when school starts, the time we have to work on our freelance business and meet client needs dwindles. Fast. With two weeks (give or take a few depending on your college) before the school year starts up again, I am going to share with you some tips and tricks to make going back to school easier on the student freelancer who also has a business to run.

When people often think about freelancers, most of the time the types of work they do are design work or writing work.  This often casts a preconceived notion that if you aren’t a designer (or web developer) or writer that you can’t be a freelancer.  Well, I am here to tell you that there are many fields in which the student-wanting-to-freelance can freelance in.  In this article, you will see that the sky is the limit in what you can offer as your freelance service.  And this article isn’t all-inclusive--let your imagination take you to freelance places you never though could be possible!

While reading through “Freelance Confidential” by Amanda Hackwith (of which yours truly has been featured in), I ran across an interesting statistic relating to the age of a freelancer and their average income. Thinking about these statistics relating to my own student freelancing career got me thinking, “maybe I am making the average.”

Glad you asked! For most starting student freelancers, the definition of freelancing has a fuzzy meaning. Is it a way to make money? A means to get a job? Or something entirely different? With freelancing being this magical world that some very brave souls venture into, what can the student freelancer learn about freelancing?

Have all this extra time on your hands now that classes are over, but don’t know how to best put it to use? Here are three ways that I am putting my spare time to good use to improve myself not only as a student but as a freelancer, and I am sure that at least one of them will help you as well.

Most engineers have a profound dislike for the subjective, and I was no exception.  In school, presentations often felt like a popularity contest no matter how unbiased the professors claimed to be.  In the freelance world though, every meeting with a client is a mini-presentation and your audience is even more influenced by his/her emotions.  To get the best contracts at the best rates, we have take a deep breath and embrace the subjective.

I love reading freelance books, when I have the time to. There have been many freelance books that I have had the pleasure to consume myself in, but below is a list of those books that I have had the time to read and review that I feel are probably the best for student freelancers. Granted, there are tons of books in my collection, including the recently released “Freelance Confidential” by Amanda Hackwith that yours truly is featured in, and I haven’t nearly had enough time to read them all, so this is just a small sampling of books that I would recommend to any student freelancer. I see a series coming on…

All I talk about on this blog is why you should freelance as a student and what you should do to help your freelaning. Truth be told, being a student freelancer sucks. Wondering why that could be after all the posts I post here saying how awesome it is? Well let me tell you the three dirty secrets student freelancers don’t tell you.

The following post is a guest post by Amanda Hackwith, author of "Freelance Confidential." See the end of the post for author and book details John Lasseter, director and chief creative officer at Pixar, summed it up beautifully: “In any creative industry, quality is the sole business plan that prevails in the long run.” The quality of your current and former work is what will turn new and returning clients into a reliable stream of work and success. Portfolios are vital for student freelancers—if clients are skeptical about working with you for any reason, you have to quickly and easily impress them with your collection of work.

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