Relm

Hey, everyone who's received an interview request, acceptance, rejection, etc.: Please, please enter your notification info into the Grad Cafe database -- for future years especially, being able to see patterns of when schools typically notify applicants with good or bad news is really helpful! (And conducive to freak-outs, for sure.) (:

Hey there southbound -- this thread is pretty much MFA candidates, not so much art therapy. Your questions probably won't get seen by the right people since they're buried in here. (Absolutely no idea how helpful our advice would be for art therapy applications.) Try starting a new thread in the Visual forum and use "art therapy" in the title so it's more visible to relevant people. You can also search the forums to see if others have asked similar questions before (there's a search box at the top of the website, and you can limit by forum). Good luck!

Hey, an FYI for those of you who want to freak out with updated statistics: looks like the College Art Association has updated their (free!) graduate school profiles with admission numbers from last year's application cycle.* You can download up to 20 individual programs' PDFs at once. Most places list the number of applications received and the number accepted. https://services.collegeart.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?WebCode=CAA_Dir_IndEntries * Some schools' numbers of applied/accepted are the exact same as the previous edition (but the admission cycle year has been updated), which I find a little suspect, but a good number of the ones I've downloaded have changed. Also, the stats also don't always line up with Peterson's, for some reason.

Your brain needs to stop it (: They wouldn't spend their time setting up and holding an interview to tell you you're an idiot. And from what I gather, they receive somewhere around 150-200 applications a year; they're not interviewing everyone. (They'd have to have a staff member whose full-time job it is to talk to applicants and make reports on those conversations for literally a month straight.) As for the dimension mistakes, if they ask you about it, set them straight. I personally wouldn't sweat it otherwise. The only reason I'd bring it up is if the difference between what you wrote and what they are would significantly change their perception/understanding of your work. (But you said they were small mistakes, so I'm guessing that's not the case.)

Dude, that's AMAZING. Congratulations! Wasn't their deadline basically a week ago?!

When I got to that final submit screen, they asked again if you wanted to upload your CV and statement. "I gave you that already," I thought, "but whatever, I want to be absolutely sure you have it." So I uploaded them again, looked at the final proof, saw they were in there twice, and could find no way to delete the extras. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah, likewise, submitted over the weekend and I'm glad I did. I'm so sorry about your reference--how frustrating. Keep dunning her tactfully, and hopefully if she gets it in this week it won't be an issue.

If you have a Mac, the first thing I'd try is Preview. Make sure thumbnail view is enabled. You can drag and drop documents (think of those pretty much as pages) onto/in the sidebar, move them around, and then export the entire thing as PDF. But make sure the exported works in other operating systems (namely, Windows) before submitting, just in case. If you run into snags, try printing your images to PDF before dropping into Preview. (And if that doesn't work, consider signing up for an Adobe free trial and downloading Acrobat -- not the free reader -- which has all the bells and whistles for making and editing PDFs.) If you have a PC, you'd probably need to download some kind of utility, but you could also do the Adobe Creative Suite month-long free trial to get Acrobat temporarily if nothing else. Good luck!

Hence the "in theory" qualifier, and using "might" instead of "will" in my original reply. Personally, I'd rather not give anyone any reason to doubt any part of my application, if it's within my control. But either decision is perfectly rational.

The video question only shows up if you list your native language as something other than English.

Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, you have the right, once you're enrolled, to view the letters of recommendation that were submitted on your behalf when you applied. However, you can indicate up front that you irrevocably waive that right. In theory, waiving your rights encourages your recommenders to be completely candid with the admissions staff. Your recommenders can write knowing the contents of their letters will remain confidential, and the admissions committee might therefore ascribe more weight to the statements in those letters. (Meaning, if your recommender wrote the letter knowing that you might see the contents later on, s/he might not tell the whole story, perhaps so as not to hurt your feelings or the like -- and the committee sees whether you waived or not.) I personally see no reason not to waive. Once you're in, you're in -- why would you need to see what someone wrote about you to get you there? (If you don't get in, you can't see the letters anyways, since they're only available when you've enrolled.) And, generally speaking, negative recommendation letters are pretty rare, assuming you picked your recommenders decently well.

Yeah, it's basically the reason why I decided not to apply to Berkeley (their studios are out in Richmond). My reasoning was that it kind of defeats the purpose of going to a university if you're in a satellite location that requires a car to get to the main campus. But hey, given that it's LA, perhaps it's not so big a deal.

Thanks so much for this, aethiryn. Admittedly, my insight comes secondhand, via a friend who is a painter applying to some UC schools, including UCSB (which she visited and feels would be a great place to develop as a painter), but that said, there's no better source than someone who spent a couple of years there (: Glad you had a good experience and didn't spend an arm and a leg doing it.

Nah. I'm actually not applying to any of the UCs and, as of right now, only to one school on the west coast. I haven't visited, but a friend of mine did. She said the pros are obvious (beautiful facilities, fantastic faculty, location, prestige); on the minus side, I think she said the studios were about a 25 minute drive from the rest of campus (and I'm assuming that's in good traffic). And they require you to take a significant load of art history/theory courses if you haven't already. Not sure what the funding landscape is like exactly -- she had the impression that you weren't guaranteed a TAship/stipend each quarter, so there is that to think about as well.

My first one's due the 8th. Don't think I'm applying anywhere with the "priority deadline" thing. Most everything's functionally done, except for one last performance I have to do to round out the portfolio. (That's a this week thing.) Nothing gets things accomplished like a deadline (:

Really love your recent work, especially Yarn. Do you have a statement online anywhere? Where're you thinking of applying?

@Kim marra: For the UCs, look at UC Irvine (which slants conceptual/interdisciplinary) and UC Santa Barbara (seems to support more traditional forms of art like painting). UCSD isn't too far from LA, either. As for USC, who knows, maybe they'll actually keep their word this time around to their students, but that's a gamble I'm personally not willing to take.

Thanks for the info. That's disappointing, but not terribly surprising. As I recall, SVA's a for-profit school. Of course, not all for-profit schools are the same and not all of them exist to rip people off, but in the simplest of terms, a for-profit is out there to make money. (There are some that are particularly heinous in this regard, like the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Stay away. Far, far away.)

That's exactly why I went last time (: I had brought some smaller physical works and showed stuff on my computer, but this year I'm just bringing my computer. May as well simulate what they'll see in a few months. You essentially sit down and talk through your concept and background as opposed to handing them written material. Just be able to talk about yourself and your work articulately; maybe have a few copies of your CV or statement if you want, but I'd be surprised if anyone wants it. The one thing I'll say, with utmost emphasis, is to make sure your photographs are GOOD and that your presentation doesn't take away from the art. Learned that the hard way. Last year I was two months into a post-bacc/serious studio practice and hadn't finished too much work, and also knew my work would likely change significantly in a year. So, to save money, I photographed the work myself (and I'm not the best photographer); I had also included some studio and WIP shots. Some people were really distracted by my shots not being exactly what they'd see in an admissions committee context and as a result spent valuable time talking about that. If your work's not professionally photographed, do your best to make your presentation as comparable as possible: proper lighting, white balance, color correction, etc. That was a little bit frustrating for me and a little preparation will go a long way. Just FYI!

So, who's going to the portfolio day at SAIC this weekend? I'm actually flying in from SF for it -- couldn't go to the SF one last weekend due to Open Studios here (which thankfully was a hit for me!). I went to the portfolio day last year with a very different body of work for information-gathering purposes, and the experience was really interesting. But now that I have my real portfolio that's pretty much done, I'm honestly a bit scared -- it's not like I'm going to be able to change very much of anything if it's a huge swing and a miss! I suppose if nothing else it'll be a good chance to ask about the logistics of the admissions committees looking at work (like, how many images do they look at at once, do they have your statement when they first look at your work, and so forth), figure out if any places I was interested in seem like a total mismatch, etc. Anyhow. Looking forward to that, if with a bit of trepidation, since now the stakes are kinda high. (:

Debts make me nervous too. I'm glad you're giving it some forethought. There are loan payment calculators on the internet you can play around with -- just google it and pick realistic interest rates and repayment times so that you have a fairly accurate figure and can set an upper limit for how much debt you can go into. I took out around $150k for a different degree. My minimum monthly payments at the beginning were around $1800 on a ten-year repayment schedule. Keep in mind that most [federal] loans charge an "origination fee" (which is 3% automatically down the drain that you don't see), and interest accrues while you are in school -- and then, at some point after you graduate, the accrued and unpaid interest is added to the principal ("capitalized interest" in loan servicer parlance), meaning that all of a sudden you are paying interest on a bigger amount than you actually took out. And keep in mind that the interest rates are insane -- at least when I took out those loans, the annual federal Stafford interest rates were 6.8% (for the first $20,500 per year), and GradPLUS (the remainder of what I took out each year, which varied due to contributions from work and savings) weighed in at 8.5%! Some servicers will give you a break once you've paid x payments on time (they'll take off a percent or so when you hit that milestone), but by and large, you are paying a pretty penny. It's rough. That's not to say it's impossible. There are some programs that exist to make life with federal loans more bearable -- such as graduated payments that start off smaller and get larger on the theory that you earn more as you grow older, and "pay as you earn" or "income-based repayment" schemes. Right now, loan forgiveness is an option too; I haven't looked into it, but my recollection is that if you make minimum payments for twenty or twenty-five years, the government will cancel the rest of the debt. A couple things to keep in mind about that, though: one, there's absolutely no guarantee that the government will continue this program for the next couple of decades, and two, cancellation of debt is considered income, which means once your debt is forgiven, you need to pay income taxes on that forgiven amount! And this doesn't take private loans' terms into account. (I have absolutely no experience with those. If that is what you'd have to do, do your research.) A few other things to keep in mind -- student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and if you don't pay them, the government will garnish tax refunds, social security, etc. to get their money back any way they can. (If it's any comfort, though, your student loans die when you do.) All this is to say that I would be very, very cautious about taking out significant loans to go to graduate school in a creative field. A graphic design degree might be more monetizable than fine arts, but chances are agencies aren't going to be lining up around the block to offer you six-figure jobs right out of school.

I dealt with this when I applied to professional school some years back. I think the question is fairly benign. Schools simply want to know how they stack up against other schools and who their competition is, which is especially true for MFA programs given how utterly stupid the U.S. News MFA ranking methodology is. (Even if you're not a stats person -- which I'm not -- read it sometime and just laugh at how ridiculous it is.) When you decline a school's offer of admission down the road, most are going to ask you where you're going instead, and why that school over them. Same thinking there. Highly skeptical, though, that your answers are going to factor into a school's admissions decision in any meaningful way. In other words, I wouldn't sweat it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Makes sense to me. Think of it in terms of what an admissions committee expects to get out of the letters, and consider whether those people will be able to speak to the admissions committee's expectations. These people will be able to speak to your practice, dedication, seriousness, substantive knowledge, intelligence, maturity, so on and so forth -- and I think it's helpful that they themselves have substantive knowledge about art. I think it also helps that you're submitting letters from people who are in your circles right now, as opposed to people who taught you in undergrad however many years ago. (Which, for me at least, definitely was some years ago.) I don't know if work ethic outside of school vs in school matters so much as work ethic, period. But it seems you've got that covered. Good luck (:

Fantastic idea, aethiryn! I'm in SF but try to get down to LA as often as I can (every month-and-a-half to two months or so)... so hey, it's possible the stars would align and I could make it in person every now and then. Definitely would be interested in Skype visits/talks with a bunch of fellow artists!

Personally, I'd only want to get recommendation letters from people whose classes I did very well in. Another way to put this: I'd only ask those people whose letters I don't have any issue waiving the access right to, because for all practical intents and purposes, I already know what'll go in them. If that means you have to get a letter from a different discipline, I think that's fine. Ideally as many as possible would be from art professors who love you, but if those are in short supply and you have a good relationship with a former music or science teacher who can attest to your work ethic, intelligence, maturity, preparedness for graduate study, etc., then I don't see the harm in asking them. Your portfolio is far and away the most important determinant of admissions decisions, so I wouldn't sweat it too much. Your situation is what it is, and I'd make the most of it. I'd personally rather submit letters full of praise from professors teaching different disciplines as opposed to art professors who are lukewarm on me. Good luck!

Hey 09, so, I'm also a non-art-world person and I went last year to the portfolio day -- a whole year early -- on the theory that more information's better than less, and I wanted to hear some people critique my work (and see how they would respond to my unusual background). My work has since drastically changed but I still think it was a very worthwhile experience. Getting a sense for how subjective the process was one key benefit, seeing which schools or which types of schools really respond to your work is another, as are making some connections, getting feedback on how to improve your portfolio and refine your concept, and checking out some new schools you might not have considered before. I will most likely go again this year with my actual portfolio. One other thing to consider: Each school varies to what extent they'll look at your portfolio when you come for a visit. A friend of mine said a number of schools she's interested in do NOT want you bring your work when you visit (I suppose they want to make sure the decisions they make in the admissions committee are unbiased?). Some schools don't even really do visits. Others only have an open house and it seems that they don't do the individual meet-and-greets and portfolio reviews there. So I wouldn't necessarily rely on visits alone since each school seems to do things a bit differently in that regard. If you do decide to go to the portfolio day, one piece of advice that I learned the hard way: show the reviewers POLISHED documentation of your work. No half-assed studio shots or works in progress. But you do not need to bring original art; showing them photos/videos on a laptop or tablet is totally fine. Some people also had color reproductions in a binder.