Senior Thesis

Among all the insane projects and crazy hours that you spend at an art school, there is one project that is more extensive and taxing than any other--the BFA Exhibition Project. For the BFA, a student must create a large scale project that ultimately signifies what he/she has learned while in school. Unlike the normal state college Bachelor Degree program, the BFA project is a requirement for Undergraduates too. And unlike your standard 50-150 page thesis paper where you hand the end result in to your professor and it gets shelved somewhere (or if you're very lucky, published), the BFA project is viewed by the entire college, your family, and most likely all the employers of the jobs you apply for in the next two to five years. No pressure.

What makes the BFA in my college so hard to manage isn't just the project itself (although that's a good part of it). It's also the extensive paperwork and the concept behind it. Getting two separate professors to sign off on your idea is hard enough. Trying to convince them time and time again that the idea is good and when it's done it'll be even better, is harder.

For this reason, around the start of the Spring semester, every Senior starts to freak out. For many, they worry about what kind of idea they should use for their project, what medium it should be. They worry that it won't be good enough, and that maybe they won't have the slightest clue what to even begin making. For my department it's different. We start a semester before. By the time the rest of the school begins to start thinking about the BFA show, we're already Animating/Filming on our projects. That doesn't keep us from freaking out though. Instead of flipping out about concept and ideas, we lose our minds over execution. Can we get the piece done in time? Will it be good enough? Did we make everything that needed to be made before hand? In the end, we can only hope that nothing goes wrong and everything pays off. And when it's all over, we can finally take a few days and sleep. Thank god for the small things.

~C.Mitchell

Never Ending Revisions

So anyone who has ever been in art school knows that unlike papers that you write, read through, edit, and then turn in for a grade, never to be touched again... revisions to art pieces never really end. Grades or almost completely subjective in Art School. Sure, you can do the work and give it your best and sometimes that's good enough, but most of the time it's not. You may walk into a classroom with what you think is a finished project, and by the time you walk out, you'll have a hundred things to change or have to start over completely. It's almost enough to make you crazy. So how do you keep any inspiration when you have professors who throw your hard work back in your face time and time again, or tell you that you're idea is crap or the person you're drawing can't physically bend that direction in real life?

Well... sometimes stress is your only sense of inspiration, followed by frustration and humor. And sometimes there is no motivation. Nothing is harder than working on an art project where you're asked to make your own concept and you're mind is grinding on nothing. You have to work, because the project has to get done... But you have nothing to say. You have no message to give anyone and no motivation. In those situations, coupled with a mass amount of sleepless nights, sometimes will power is the only fuel you have left. But at the end of it all, you're still alive, and somehow most of the time, you pull through.

So that test that you never studied for, or that paper that you wrote in a night... well, we'll let it slide this once, because lets face is, Art School is hard. And when we are inspired, and we do have the time to really buckle down and act like a normal college student, we might just surprise you...