Sure thing--
In general the wheels just seemed to be falling off the bus of the entire program with major failures of leadership (3/6 other incoming students wanted to leave for their own reasons, and the upperclassman filed grievances with the union last year), but I personally felt like it was not the right fit for me artistically so I will speak more to that.. I am a very dedicated studio artist who just wants to make and play and experiment and talk about art and look at art and read when I feel like it but not all the time. I worked in a library for 7 years so I am not anti-reading, I just don't want to spend more time reading than making. The program was so rigid and filled with dumb rules and protocols so no one was making art in their studio or talking about it. It was such an uninspiring environment and downright boring. I took MFA classes in my undergrad at PAFA and just knew that UMass was not taking art making seriously.
My perspective comes from being a teacher and a student at the same time. MFA's were supposed to shadow an instructor as a TA but they did not have enough money to hire them, so first year incoming MFA's were asked to teach undergraduate level classes right away. The MFA's were frustrated that we were only compensated for 10 hrs a week despite spending upwards of 20hrs to prepare to teach/grade papers/learn new material etc. which cut into our own education. The syllabus that I was given to teach was unproductively rigid, even though it was labeled as a studio class. There was no art making for almost a month and a half, and the poor kids were only allowed to write essays and give power point presentations based on the unnecessarily large amounts of readings they were assigned. Then when they finally would have been able to make, the projects were super strict and there was no room for them to develop their personal voice or experiment in any way. They were not shown contemporary artists because the school thought that they would copy them???????? There were rules on how to send emails. Rules on how to keep a sketchbook. Rules and rules and rules and rules and rules and more rules. I was personally quite frustrated because the professor who designed the syllabus has a practice that is all about disability advocation, but when myself and several of the students in the class with learning disabilities were overwhelmed by imbalance of reading to making, they pretty much just said screw you this is a research institution so we read more than we make art here (which is not true.. so many really wonderful making based programs fall within research institutions...).
MFA's do not have their own studio classes, so I spent the entire time adding and dropping classes just trying to find any that would not be a giant waste of time. 12 hours of my week were spent in state school level undergraduate art classes being shown youtube videos on how to draw. I kept walking into classes and having the professor say things like, "you already know how to paint, what are you doing in this class??" even though it was the only class listed as a masters level painting class but when I walked in it was filled with freshman undergraduates. There was also a really funny dynamic where you had to plan everything that you were going to make in the first week of the semester so they were really against experimenting and following your artistic urges. There did not seem to be any trust that anyone had any motivation to be there unless you had written a contract and preplanned your projects in advanced.. very different from my undergraduate experience.
Just not a good fit for me, and I apologize for being so scattered-- I have a lot of opinions on this place and would be happy to answer any other questions that you have!
