What is expected of a advertising student's porfolio?

I recommend having something tangible to show prospective employers. Theoretically, you should be able to market yourself before you market for others.

Having a resume with references to electronic media would be a good place to utilize your current work, but I would definitely look into creating some stuff that you can hand someone if I were you. First impressions are everything, and to show that you are on top of your work shows that you are able. Mixed media portfolios can also make you look more versatile.

Are you a design student, or marketing and advertising? If you’re not on a creative path, you won’t have a portfolio. If you are a design student, I would use assignments from class, and talk about the technical stuff you did to manipulate files, the outputs, how you assembled the documents. Virtually every design student that goes into agency work puts in time in production. Bad production sinks creativity, and overruns budgets. The fact that you know CMYK from RGB, file sizes, resolution, manipulating layers, kerning, leading and can recognize a widow when you see it, goes a long way.

i want to get into creative, but i havent had and creative classes

Start making mock ads then… Building out your tangible portfolio will make yourself more marketable.

It is a good idea, however, to understand the fundamentals of the mediums that you use. Knowing this will make you far more efficient which will, in turn, help you to stand out.

If you haven’t had creative classes, then you won’t need a portfolio yet.

this makes sense.

What are you interested in doing in Advertising or Marketing?

ad,

No, not which area, what type of role? Account service, media, copy, design? Are you artistic and plan on pursuing a design or web development, a creative writer, or are you interested in working directly with clients on account service?

id like to consider myself artistic. id love to work in the more creative side of adv.

my ultimate goal is to be a CD, or maybe an art director.

As you pick up classes in InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. you will build a portfolio. If you think about it as you’re doing assignments, keep notes and make printouts, so you’re able to build a portfolio as you go along. I recently received a resume that was a .pdf with embedded .pdfs of print samples and links to websites.

Another thing to keep in mind, and is probably a good thing learn to do while in school is to learn to track time expended for creative assignments, for the different stages. A design is only as good as its ability to be executed in the time budgeted for it. If a client has a $5,000 budget for a website, then you need to provide creativity that can be executed in the amount of time that $5,000 can buy, allowing for design revisions, etc. Otherwise, if you create something that costs $25,000 in time to produce, then it’s a bad design for the project. Which is why learning to understand the relationship of design to budget is important. One of the surest ways to get fired is to design pieces that are too expensive to execute.