So Very Dark

Seriously people.

The people I’m speaking to?  My fellow COLLEGE classmates.  Yes, I know, this is an art institute and not, for example, an Ivy League college…but it’s still college, and not an inexpensive one at that.  Yet, people skip classes (risking failure and missing important class information) and turn in projects that, well….  This is ART COLLEGE!  Your projects should look GOOD!

Sorry…you might be wondering why I’m so riled up…unless I’ve already bitched to you tonight.

In my History and Analysis of Design class, the first week we were assigned a project that was due at the mid-term (today).  We had no other projects for the class aside from our class notebook, which was for taking notes IN CLASS and jotting down sketches and relevant information.

Due to personal problems, I slacked VERY badly on this project.  I did hardly anything for the first four weeks, then spent the past few days I had available attempting to make my project presentable in time.  I basically compiled a 5 week project (including a short research paper, a Power Point presentation and my hands-on project in the style I was studying) in less than a week.

The above mentioned form of studentship is BAD.  I was horribly irresponsible and feel that my project could have been better.  I left myself no time to compensate for emergencies.  My research was shoddy.  I was up until 2 last night finishing my Power Point slides, and did my only pre-class practice presentation this morning on low caffeine.  I also got about 3 hours of sleep and wasn’t at my best.

I had one of the best presentations in the class.  My hands-on project looked organized, finished and relatively professional.  When I presented to the class, I attempted to make the information interesting, looked people in the eye, and did not turn my back to my audience and read directly off my slides, but used index cards with hints about the information I was sharing to remind me of what I wanted to discuss.  …unlike most of my classmates.  Yes.  To ALL of the above.

I did BADLY.  I threw my project together last minute.  I did the best I could in doing so, and tried to bring my project up to a standard that I thought was at least required in a college-level class.  We had 5 weeks.  The other projects should have been AMAZING.  Even if, as Briggs mentioned, they were also made over the weekend…well, so was mine.  They should have been at least that good.  I believe that EVERY other Power Point presenter (we had a choice) turned their back and read information off of their slides.  The good ones mentioned some suplimental information as well.

There were a few very decent projects and presentations…but they were far from being the majority.  I know that this seems like a silly thing to whine about, since the end result is that my classmates made me look great and I probably got away with being a bad student (we don’t get our grades until next week)…but it just aggrivates me deeply.  At this level of education, people should have learned how to do a project.  People who are in art school should care about the projects that could be going into their portfolios for prospective employers to see.  They should have at least listened to our instructor last week when he reminded us that we should use index cards and remember to look members of our audience in the eye, even if they hadn’t learned that part of giving an oral report in all their previous years of school.  And I should have been madly pwnd by my classmates’ awesomeness and hidden in shame while cutting myself with my sub-standard project in remorse.

Hehe.  Oral.

Yeah…okay.  I’m done.