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