grad_wannabe

I don't know anything about your program or field, nor have I been to either Baltimore or Atlanta, but I can tell you that Hong Kong is an intensely amazing place. I don't know whether you've visited, but it's a high-paced collision of peoples from all over the planet, overflowing with energy and culture. It's like the cross roads of the whole world. I would move there in a heartbeat.

Sometimes syllabi are linked to or attached to class schedules... i know that's not as comprehensive as a search engine (which would be AWESOME) but it's something.

Haha this freaked me out too - knowing I'm going to be a TA and leading discussions ... I keep trying to picture myself in the spot of the grad students I worked with an an undergrad, and i feel totally silly and unprepared. "That's not me! I'm not ready for that! I can't answer your questions, I can't even tie my shoes right!" @ Old Lady - I know what you mean. A friend of mine, still in undergrad, told me "I can't compete with you, your CV is scary." and I thought, "It is? Really?" But then I realized that I've worked my ass off around the clock towards the same goal for 10 years, so yeah, the culmination of that ought to be impressive-looking. I think we forget how hard we've all worked for this, because we're so used to it. these schools admitted us for a reason - WE CAN DO IT!

I'm moving out of Orange County for the first time in 25 years. I will certainly not miss the godforsaken TRAFFIC and the soul crushing commutes (405 freeway, I love you, but you're a bit of a bitch most of the time). I'm looking forward to public transportation!! (which is like a bad word here.) I won't miss sharing class time with all the kids who signed up to be art majors because "it seemed easy!" or "it seemed fun!" I sure as HELL won't miss having to say, "Oh, no, still working on that BA .... yeah I know it's been 7 years, what??" I will not miss filling out subcontractor insurance tender letter matrices, which is what I'm doing at work at this very moment. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ I will miss my mom and dad. I will miss my mom and dad a lot.

what happened? did you get into the ISP?

I was surprised with how well this application round went. It was my first ever year to apply (just graduated last June) and I was told by multiple people that it "usually takes a couple years of applying to get a good combination of program, acceptance and funding." On top of that, the crappy economy inflated the applicant pool, so I was nervous I'd be edged out by the intense competition. i prayed that I'd get into one, just ONE program so I wouldn't have to go through this intense application process again next year, even though I only applied to top-shelf programs (I told myself that I didn't want a Plan B school - it was either get into a top choice this year, or wait and apply to different schools next year). I ended up with no rejections at all - 3 acceptances and 1 waitlist out of 4 applications. On top of that, one of the acceptances came with 50% funding, and the other two were fully funded (one offered a TA position, the other a Graduate Department Fellowship). One school I didn't even bother visiting beforehand because "there's no way I'll get in, so why waste the time and money?" Their acceptance and fellowship offer were a total shock. Overall VERY pleased with everything. Sure, there were a couple bumps in the road (schools claiming not to have received materials when I'd already gotten delivery confirmations, a bad group interview, and I got sick of paying for millions of transcripts) but everything came up roses.

Does anyone know anything about Tang Residence Hall? I'm hoping to get picked in the on-campus housing lottery, and it looks like Tang has the cheapest options. I'm going to try to subsist on my 1,000/mon stipend, and the cheapest on-campus housing looks to be around 750/mon but off-campus doesn't look any better - am I wrong? I'm moving to Cambridge from Southern California in August, so I won't really be able to look in-depth at off-campus housing before I get there (going out for just a couple days in mid-May).

I did my UG here so I may be biased, but UCI's MFA is a great program and produces amazing alumni. Hong-An Truong went to the Whitney ISP her first year after graduating. Ruben Ochoa was in the Whitney Biennial and won a Rockefeller Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship within 5 years of finishing, They have some star faculty, between Yvonne Rainer, Daniel Martinez, Simon Leung and Monica Majoli. Between UCI and CalArts, there are so many faculty at Irvine that are affiliated in some way with CalArts (Deborah Oliver teaches at both, Daniel Martinez got his degree there, Andrea Bowers moved to CalArts from Irvine, Catherine Lord is the former dean of CalArts) that you'd be making a lot of the same contacts at a tiny fraction of the price.

Your GPA will improve in your last two years, when you're taking classes primarily in your own major/field of interest. Don't worry.

I know EXACTLY what you mean. I had multiple people tell me I was an idiot for making the choice I did. One friend of mine even sat me down for an entire afternoon and lectured me on why I should choose School #1, he said to go anywhere else would be "insane." Another guy I knew from school actually called me just to say, "You got into School #1 and you're not going? Wow, you're stupid." I feel kind of silly saying this, but I saw Alice in Wonderland a couple days ago and one part struck a chord with me: all these people are telling Alice she needs to slay the Jabberwocky. Everyone's got an opinion and thinks they know better than her what she should do. Then the Queen told her, "Make sure you're making this choice for YOU and not anyone else, because although everyone's got an opinion on it now, if you go up there with that sword, you go alone." So, forget what everyone else is telling you - you alone will hold that sword, so you alone make the choice.

I agree that curating usually falls under a more art-history/museum studies/curatorial studies type of bent. I do know, though, that the curating I've done (I got a UROP fellowship to start a gallery in a new information sciences building at my UG uni) had a big effect on my admission to CalArts (Tom brought it up both during a preliminary meeting I had with him back in the fall and during my official interview in the spring), and I suspect that it also played a big part in my admission to MIT (being a science-y program). So, while the fields are usually separated, the mixing of disciplines we're seeing in higher art education today (especially for students working in a variety of mediums) means anything is fair game to include in a portfolio, as pedagogical institutions evolve in a thematically based direction. Just as an example, my work involves a lot of investigation into the cognition of perception and the process of compartmentalization of knowledge. While I work through these issues primarily in video, installation and performance, I also curate along these same themes and ideas. The curating is just another facet of my practice - every facet is reaching for the same ontological comprehension. Thus, I present it in the same context as the rest of my portfolio.

Hmm no I guess you're right - curating is not really a discipline per se. I just threw it in there as part of the list of stuff I like to do!

This one is for the NYU ITP kids out there -- An article in New York magazine dropped a few nice paragraphs on the school in a recent story on tech start-ups in the city. Thought you guys might like it: ________________________________________ The Interactive Telecommunications Program—or ITP, as everyone calls it—is an NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate program in art and technology housed on the fourth floor of a university building that takes up most of a city block, from Broadway to Mercer Street and Washington Place to Waverly Place. I’m there on a warm March afternoon with Crowley, the 33-year-old co-founder of Foursquare, who is a 2004 graduate and sometime instructor. Crowley’s first company, Dodgeball, a kind of Foursquare precursor that was sold to Google in 2005, was developed here with a fellow ITP student named Alex Rainert. ITP feels like an Alice in Wonderland version of graduate school. There’s a piece of wall art that, Crowley points out, is actually a mirror; stand in front of it, and the wooden slats move. Crowley—who is wearing turquoise Adidas, jeans, and a gray long-sleeved sweatshirt—gestures to several innocent-seeming plants hanging from hooks near the big windows overlooking Broadway. “Those are Botanicalls,” he says. “When they need to be watered, they send you a message on Twitter that says, ‘Water me, please.’ I have it hooked up with one of my plants at home.” There’s a vending machine that, next to Twix and salted almonds, sells Photocell 200K light sensors for $1.25. The machine doesn’t take cash—you pay online, and the machine automatically registers it. Crowley, who majored in communications at Syracuse, had been laid off from Vindigo, a city guide for Palm-device users, in 2001. He was planning on applying to business school when a friend invited him to “this weird art show.” It was one of ITP’s twice-annual student shows, and Crowley felt at home. “There was a girl who had a project that was just three robots following each other around. I said, ‘I need to be here playing with this stuff. This is where I belong,’ ” he says. In the lounge, a bunch of students are sitting around tables on their laptops. “See that foosball table?” Crowley asks. There are four guys playing what looks like an intense match. “That was my first project at ITP. I put sensors in the goals. When you started playing, you swiped your NYU I.D. on the table and your stats got shown on the screens behind it. If you scored a goal, it would show.” “I wanted to make the foosball table smarter,” he says. “My professor”—Internet-culture guru Clay Shirky—“said to go analyze a source of social data. I had all the data from the foosball table, and I started thinking, What do friendship circles look like? Who are the outliers? Who doesn’t connect to other folks? I was trying to wrap my head around it. “To make a foosball table smarter isn’t that different from ‘Let’s make a city smarter,’ ” he says ___________________________________________________________________________

I was just ruminating on how strange it is that the hottest art programs are often in non-art schools. With the myriad of art-dedicated schools out there, how is it some of the brightest programs are at UCLA, USC, Yale, Hunter and Columbia? You'd think art schools would have cornered the market on that...

That's weird they counted your parents' income to calculate your EIC. Are you 23 or older? If so, there's a section on the FAFSA where it says something like, "according to your reported information, it is not required for you to report your parents' income. Would you like to do so anyway?" Make sure you answered NO. Once you check that box in the online form, the entire "parents' assets" section disappears.

I had the same outlook as you, going into this process (see the variety of schools/programs I applied to below). I work in video, installation, performance, curating, writing and drawing. USC and MIT might both be good options for you, as well as NYU's ITP program if you're into programming and digital work. Do you have a website we could look at?

Oh MAN thank you for posting this. The decision I made has been haunting me since the moment I made it. I got into two distinct programs. One (USC) is an MFA in Studio Art, a strong program with a star-packed faculty and a lot of buzz. Their graduates typically get into really amazing exhibitions, galleries, museums and residencies very quickly after graduating. They gave me a ridiculously generous funding package and told me flat out that they loved my work and were eager to get me in the program. The school is close to my family, I already knew a lot of the professors through networking and visiting, and I like the campus and love the program. I feel close to the people there, and actually felt a strong emotional pull to that school from the beginning. It was a strong fit overall, and would have boded extremely well for a solid career as an exhibiting artist. The second acceptance is for an MS in Visual Studies from MIT. A much stranger, harder-to-define program. They study not just art, but a mix of art, theory, design and architecture. Their graduates track MUCH differently after graduating: some go into private sector work, some write, some teach, and others exhibit. They tend to show in places that are not as hot, famous or glamorous as USC grads, but are more disparate and thoughtful, with a wider range of activities and venues. I felt their basic intellectual thrust (that of "creation of knowledge through art-making") fit very closely not just with my career as an artist, but my ideals as a person overall. They also gave me ridiculously good funding package (a fellowship including 100% tuition waiver plus a stipend), but the school is across the continent from everyone and everything i know. I've never been to the campus. Never even interviewed, and I don't know a single person. The acceptance and fellowship were a total shock. It felt very much like I had to choose what kind of person I was going to be, which life I wanted to live. I went with the latter. Though I know now is the time to suck it up and throw myself full force into my choice, I can't help but feel .... not dissatisfied, but ... haunted. What could have been?

CONGRATS!! I keep hearing great things about that program.

I respectfully disagree on both counts. Where you go to grad school is where you make your connections and networks. Though it doesn't strictly dictate the choices you make after school, it does bode strongly for where opportunities will be the richest, and thus heavily influences where you will be building your career. Grad schools absolutely buy students. There are only a handful of "top" students that the big programs all want and will compete for. Mnchick's experience is a perfect illustration of that: SAIC heard she got into Yale, so they increased their financial offer in order to woo her to their school. They (SAIC) saw competition for the product they want (mnchick) so they increased their bid. That's the definition of a bidding war. That's buying a student.

What a great idea for a thread! I feel strongly about issues surrounding new and emerging models of master's programs because they dictated my search for a grad school from the beginning. Coming out of UG I had a very diverse outlook: I wanted to make work, and write, and curate, and do research. I had taken classes in everything from the full slate of studio art curriculum to digital arts, art history, art criticism, humanities, psychology, linguistics, women's studies, etc., and I wanted to keep up the same rate of inquiry in grad school. When I started looking at grad programs, I got frustrated with the "classic MFA model." I didn't want to declare allegiance to one medium, or even one field of working. I don't consider myself a photographer, or a painter, or a sculptor. Hell I don't even like saying "I'm an artist." I prefer to say, "I'm a thinker, I make art to help me think and figure things out." I started to bemoan my lack of focus, and worried I wasn't cut out for grad school - especially daunting since I wasn't cut out for the job market either. Then, I started stumbling across programs that encouraged the type of thinking I like to indulge in. Cross-disciplinary and academic, with an eye towards investigation and awe. Then I found MIT and couldn't believe it; their graduates had what I can only describe as "grown-up" versions of my own CV, with idea-based (rather than medium-based) bodies of work. When I read the line in their promotional literature, "we see art making as the creation of knowledge" I was hooked. Short version: KEEP LOOKING for programs tailored to what YOU want to do. There are so many different programs out there, NEVER settle for what you think someone else is expecting of you.

Their three-year program runs about 5-6 students per year, if I recall correctly (I did my UG there). Corrected: 10 per year.

I live about two miles from CSULB and have a lot of friends that got their art degrees there, and they all concur with Maybe_Someday - they all loved it. The art program, especially, is really lauded as one of the best in SoCal.

I had one program that accepted me over the phone. I reciprocated, when I declined that offer, by calling that person directly. He thanked me specifically for calling, and said he wouldn't have wanted to find out via email. If a potential adviser or department chair called you to give you your acceptance, give them the same courtesy.

have you checked out calarts fellowship and scholarship pages? they list outside help you can apply for: http://calarts.edu/studentlife/careerresources/fellowshipsandgrants http://calarts.edu/financialaid/outsidescholarships 100K is a LOT of debt. I go by the rule of thumb (which I've written about elsewhere on the board) that I've heard from loan and financial counselors: don't take out more than you think you'll make your first year out of school. As written above, your situation is slightly better because as a designer, you're looking at making a lot more money than a painter. Here are the number generated by an online debt calculator (i did the same thing for the painter asking about Claremont): Loan balance: $100,000 Interest rate: 6.8% Term: 20 years Monthly Payment: $763.34 Total interest paid: $83,201.36 Only you can decide if you can handle shelling out 800 bucks a month for two decades.

I've visited both SVA (albeit, about 10 years ago) and ITP (this past January). I would HANDS DOWN choose ITP, especially since you got the scholarship. No question. ITP is an amazing program with opportunities for both real-world career applications (the week I visited, they told me that Apple, Wikipedia, and Google had all been there recruiting) and fine-art work (one of their graduates, Camille Utterback, won a Macarthur Fellowship). Their people are warm and they have crafted an environment to nurture ideas that will shape the future of telecommunications. I plan to keep in close contact with everyone there. If you want more information, visit the Arts > Visual board on this forum, there are a ton of people there who are familiar with the minute details of both programs. http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/79-visual/ Congrats on your acceptances!