Olivia Gorman '19 finished her Wesleyan career as the kind of athlete almost no one becomes by accident: a three-sport Cardinal who played soccer, basketball, and softball while double-majoring in Studio Art and Italian Studies. She also scored 1,000 career points in basketball and tied the program's single-game scoring record with 35. Today, after earning a Master of Industrial Design at Pratt and sharpening her craft through cabinetry and custom fabrication, she is focused on launching her own furniture brand, Phillip's Daughter. The path makes more sense than it first appears. It begins with the habits that three seasons a year forced her to build: discipline, adaptability, and the ability to keep going when the day is already full.
Looking back, Gorman says the most important reason she was able to sustain that life at Wesleyan was simple: she loved it. The schedule was hard. The demands were real. But she genuinely wanted to be in those gyms, on those fields, in those studios, and in those classrooms. That love made the discipline possible. It taught her how to work hard, set goals, and push herself toward them. Her biggest lesson from those years still sounds like an athlete's rule and a designer's rule at once: if you want something, go get it. Work hard, refuse to quit, and you give yourself a chance to reach it.
That mix of athletics, art, and language often felt like living in two different worlds, but over time the worlds started informing each other. Sports taught her how to compete, respond, and recover. Studio art and Italian trained her to observe, make meaning, and express ideas with care. She came to see that design has a competitive side too. You put work into the world, take critiques, hear opinions from every angle, and keep moving. In that sense, creative work was never as far from athletics as it might have looked from the outside. Both asked her to live through wins and losses, learn from them, and come back sharper.
The big basketball moments only deepened that mindset. Scoring 1,000 points at Wesleyan was one of her goals, and she says that every time she stepped on the court she wanted to score as much as possible. Tying the single-game scoring record with 35 points was a great bonus, but the larger lesson came from the preparation behind it. Pressure never disappears, she says. It just becomes more manageable when you have done the work. That idea now travels with her into client presentations, design reviews, and the making process itself. Goals matter, but so does the preparation that makes the moment feel familiar when it arrives.
She also thinks often about the harder parts of college sports, not just the highlights. When asked what still influences how she collaborates, Gorman points first to the challenging moments and tough conversations she had with teammates and coaches. Those experiences taught her how to work with different personalities, communicate clearly, and keep pushing toward a common goal even when people are tired, frustrated, or not seeing things the same way. That is as true in a shop or client relationship as it is on a team. The work does not move without trust, and trust does not happen without communication.
Her senior thesis, Nomadic Furniture, now looks like an early sign of where she was headed. Gorman says she never really thought of herself as an artist in the pure sense. Even as a studio art major, she naturally gravitated toward projects that were more functional. Furniture was the place where that instinct finally clicked. The thesis helped her see that creativity did not need to live only in image or concept. It could live in objects that are expressive and useful at the same time.
That realization carried her to Pratt, where she pursued industrial design and focused more intentionally on furniture. Industrial design is broad, she says, but furniture has always had a strong place within it, and graduate school helped her refine her approach. More importantly, it helped her discover something central about her own practice: she did not just want to design objects. She wanted to make them.
That is why the making side became so important. Her apprenticeship in handcrafted cabinetry and her time as a woodshop monitor were not side notes to the design work. They were essential to it. In her view, learning how things are made can only make you a better designer. She puts it more plainly and more memorably than most designers would: there is nothing worse than a cute chair that you cannot actually sit in. Function matters. Materials matter. Construction matters. Good design has to survive contact with the real world.
That hands-on understanding shaped her time creating custom furniture and continues to shape the brand she is now building. Gorman says there is no better feeling than taking something from her mind and turning it into a physical reality. Sometimes the piece evolves during the building process. Sometimes it comes out exactly the way she imagined it. Either way, she still feels a little surprised when the object finally exists in front of her. What she loves most is that transformation from idea to thing: something tangible, useful, and real.
Her Wesleyan years prepared her for that kind of work in another way too. Playing three sports meant constantly shifting seasons, teammates, and roles. Soccer asks different things of you than basketball. Basketball feels different from softball. The rhythm changes. The expectations change. The group changes. She says that experience kept her on her toes and never let her get bored, and she still feels that effect now as she moves between design, fabrication, and client-facing work. She is comfortable changing gears because she had to learn how to do it over and over again.
When current Wesleyan student-athletes ask about creative careers, Gorman keeps the translation direct. Sports teach you to set goals, work hard, collaborate, and stay resilient. Those are not just athletic qualities. They are creative ones too. They help you take critique without collapsing, adapt when a project changes shape, and keep pushing until the work becomes what it needs to be.
In the end, the part of the student-athlete experience that prepared her best was not any one record or title. It was the full rhythm of it: the discipline, the teamwork, the pressure, the repetition, and the constant movement between different kinds of demands. Wesleyan taught her how to chase goals seriously without losing the joy of the chase. That is still the engine behind her work now. Three sports may have ended, but the mindset never really did.
