I’ve been thinking about going back to school for a few years now. I’ve made a couple of false starts and I still can’t fully commit to a major, but I have fully committed to more education.

I have pretty much always considered myself an artist. I was involved in art all through high school, but was convinced by my family that majoring in art at university would be a mistake. I’ve continued taking art classes for fun, and I’ve experimented in most forms of art & craft, including most recently dabbling in printmaking. I love taking the continuing education art classes offered through the local museum of modern art.

What I like most is doing illustration and graphic design (and some web design). Graphic design is often not really considered art, and a lot of times it can just be clip art arranged in thoughtful ways with random ink splatter photoshop brushes applied and called art. What I am interested in is kind of a combination of fine art and graphic design.

I have taught myself a lot about graphic design in the last couple of years, but I am at a point where I now where I recognise that I have a lot left to learn and not really sure where to go from here. I’m the kind of learner where, when I hit a wall, I just keep hitting the wall until I finally break through it. I have a lot of cheats and work arounds that I use because I don’t know the “right” way to use a program. While these things work, I also know they are not the best or more efficient use of my time or the program. Learning to use them properly is only going to increase the number of things I can do.

Trying to decide between getting an Associates of Applied Science in graphic design or a BFA/BA is difficult. Most people do not realise that I never finished my BA. While I don’t really feel that this has held me back much in life, I still sometimes wish that I had my BA. However, the transfer BFA/BA program at Austin Community College only has four art classes over four semesters, the rest are all core courses. I still need most of my core courses because I chose, perhaps foolishly, to focus on my major courses before I dropped out. I could probably squeeze in a couple of extra art classes, but I would mostly be doing core coursework, and I am at a point where I would prefer to focus on design.

(this is not to imply in anyway that core coursework isn’t necessary and I will be completing some even if I get an AAS, just that it is not as core-intensive)

Also, the university I would likely transfer to is Texas State, which is about an hour and a half away, which would be a really bad daily commute and I’m not sure I would even want to do it. There is always UT but I doubt I would be able to get in (it’s very competitive) or Concordia (religiousity), but they are also much more expensive.

With the AAS, I would be taking four design classes a semester, which I love the idea of. On the other hand, with the AAS, if I decide to get a BA in graphic design, none of the program courses are transferable. There may be exceptions (it’s up to the school) but they are considered to be tech/vocational courses and are not applied to the BA coursework.

Still, I have opted to enter the AAS program. I’m committing to two or three semesters, at which point I can re-think switching to the BFA/BA. After about five hours of standing in lines on campus, I have finally gotten everything all straightened out. That’s a completely different blog entry about the insane and impractical administrative policies that I think all community colleges love to implement. I registered for my courses today – Basic Illustration, Basic Graphic Design, Digital Publishing and Digital Imaging. Of these I’m most looking forward to Illustration and Publishing.

I feel very excited and I am so lucky to have such an awesome husband supporting me. When I told him I was thinking about going back to school, he didn’t hesitate to tell me that he thought it was a great idea. I am not sure how much I will talk about it, but I will probably post my coursework and projects on flickr if anyone is interested.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 8:02 am and is filed under school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.