Ideasicle Expert Profile: Claudia Caplan Never Stops Learning
Claudia Caplan is one of my go-to Ideasicle Experts because she has attitude, she is fearless, she’s brilliant, and says exactly what she thinks. All important ingredients in being successful within our little idea generating platform. But one thing I didn’t know until recently is her relentless curiosity and depth that comes with continuous higher learning. Just an inspiration. But I’m going to let her tell you.
In May 2022, I graduated from Columbia University. That is not a typo. After years and years in advertising, mostly as a copywriter and creative director, I went to college. Like many creative types I knew, I’d never finished the first time around. Too eager to work and make money. At that time, advertising was the perfect choice. There were no graduate schools for building a portfolio. Copywriting was mostly an apprenticeship business. If you had a way with words and found the right mentor, your assignments quickly grew from the jobs nobody wanted to legitimate opportunities for recognition and advancement.
I never felt any shame at not having a diploma and I loved the part of copywriting that demanded you dive down a rabbit hole of information, whether on golf clubs, or luxury cars or cheeseburgers. But as my career advanced, so too did my desire to find out what I’d missed -- to learn for the pure joy of learning. So in 2017 when I was working at the in-house agency at Calvin Klein, I decided to see what I could do about it.
I found out that you could take “real” (not extension) courses at NYU as a visiting student. I figured I would test my imagined desire for something more esoteric by taking a class in 18th century literature and poetry. I loved it. Then I took another class. And another. World War I. The history of early New York City. I was hooked. Finally, I applied to both NYU and Columbia, got in to both and chose Columbia. I made the commitment to be a full-time college student with kids the age of my kids. Columbia has something called “the Core.” It means that regardless of major, you should be well-rounded. In my case, it meant that I was taking math for the first time since 8th grade and French for the first time since I graduated high school. To enter a classroom and find out that the head of the Astrophysics Department is your professor is far scarier than any client I’ve ever had. To my surprise, I loved his course. It was a master class in learning how to learn.
At Columbia, I immersed myself in everything from physical anthropology to jazz studies and it was a feast. After three years including zoom classes as a result of Covid, I graduated magna cum laude with honors in History and the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for my undergraduate thesis on Jackie Robinson. More than that, I graduated with the conviction that learning is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, whether at the university level or learning about a client’s business. Presently, I’m in graduate school at NYU working on a Master’s focused on baseball and the impact of Afro-Latino players and I am learning every day.
Good luck pinning Claudia down. All I can say is that she will only become more and more valuable to Ideasicle X the more she learns. Her curiosity about the world is contagious. Congratulations, Claudia!
Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle X. Follow him on LinkedIn and sign up for our newsletter.