Ghakimx Goes to Art School

[Ghakimx]

Well, yeah.

I've been enrolled for like 4 weeks now. War have modules like drawing, 3D (wire sculptures), art studies, 2D (painting, drawing, etc). FYI I'm doing a 3 year diploma in broadcast media and my first year is a foundation in visual arts (WTF).

To be honest, jumping from vocational college to art college is a different world. The amount of work piles up like ass and I'm frankly not keeping up very well. I ain't got time for FFR, at this point.

If any of you guys have went through a similar experience or can give some words of advice and encouragement, that would really help me.

[Gundam-Dude]

The term "broadcast media" is already pretty vague in itself, but I definitely see the purpose of exploring art fundamentals and the like to spark and fuel your creative engine. What you're studying does fall under a sub-category of communication arts, so even if the current work you're doing doesn't necessarily seem relevant to what you imagined the program would offer, it's included into the program's curriculum for a purpose. Most post-secondary institutions undergo some process of curriculum review every few years to ensure the courses and study material that's offered to students are up-to-date and relevant knowledge to graduates once they begin looking for jobs for a career.

If you feel discouraged at the moment because you expected to be jumping right into working with broadcasting mediums, bear with it and plow through the workload—it'd probably be beneficial to your thought processes later on once you actually delve into what you want to learn and experience.

I guess from personal experience, when I was in school for graphic design, the entire first semester was 95% focused on visual fundamentals (drawing, fine arts, practical hands-on work, etc.)—the actual computer work didn't begin until the second semester onwards. The program was structured this way because college professors are well aware that a large majority of freshman just want to delve right into the computer artwork, without having a solid understanding of design elements and principles, let alone the necessary creative drive to produce amazing work.

Creating artwork in itself is a timeless and practically never-ending process, but I guess you should establish certain "acceptable" standards in terms of quality of work given the amount of available time you have—deadlines are final after all, and what matters is that you delivered it in a timely manner as expected. I can't count how many times I've submitted a project that I felt "wasn't very good" or "rushed" but in the end they ended up getting good grades from my professors at the time. And later on down the road, I could go back to these projects to polish them up and improve them overall just for personal satisfaction or even to make them portfolio pieces in which I could use for job applications.

I guess as an example, if you have 3~4 projects to work on at the same time that all have deadlines the following week after being assigned, you should pace and schedule your work times accordingly (common sense, right?). You shouldn't spend too much time perfecting one project when you have multiple others to tend to, so you'll have to make certain judgment calls just to meet deadlines (much like if you were working a real job). If it means losing a few hours of sleep, flopping from meetups with buddies, becoming a shut-in hermit for a period of time, etc. then there's really no helping it. This is really a matter of work ethic and time management overall, so if you're not very good with either, then you'll have to make certain decisions to make ends meet.

I don't really know if anything from my post here is helpful, but I felt like responding anyways. Good luck regardless, and keep pushing on with what you're doing!

[Ghakimx]

Actually, GD, that pretty much sums up the entire experience. It's not as though I'm incapable of doing said works but there's so much to do and honestly, I haven't really adjusted to it so well.

When they say "Broadcast Media", they pretty much mean any kind of works that can be broadcasted or televised, inclusive of TV shows, movies, radio, advertisements. Yet somewhere somehow, I'm always questioning the reason I'm doing so much fine art. I actually have very little foundation in arts, so I'm taking the lessons as being useful for my course and well-being, nonetheless.

And the true hell of the school hasn't even begun until next semester. That, along with some housing complications, makes things worse for me.

I wanna cry, in all honesty.