Too often in the past I have threatened to go to graduate school. Unfortunately I’ve never actually applied. I keep saying I’ll do it the next year, but I think it might be this year. I’m going to be pretty hard pressed to get a portfolio ready in time. I’m not sure how many schools I should look at applying to. Without having been anywhere, MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) is my first choice. Graduate students can audit any undergrad class and they work with a mentor all three years to help put together a thesis. It’s also only about hours from some pretty decent skiing.
UCLA is another program I’m interested in, particularly the interdisciplinary study program. Studies also show that the more reknown your alma mater is, the better chances are that you’ll have a job afterwards. UCLA, being a university and not a college, also offers a wider variety of resources available to students (rec centers, etc).
I’ll probably also look into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, through if memory serves, I wasn’t terribly impressed with their graduate program. The MFA in Studio seems to have a lot of participating departments, but it is only a two year program which doesn’t seem like much time to learn new things compared to MCAD’s three year program.
What I need to apply:
- Up to 20 of my strongest works
- Three letters of recommendation
UCLA’s deadline is soonest, December 15. MCAD’s is a month later. When I wake up this evening I’m going to start going through an interactive piece of mine and get it going. After that is fixed and ready, I guess I’ll just start drawing and painting when I can find the time. Any tips, tricks, or suggestions to improve my chances would be greatly appreciated.
Yesterday morning I had a meeting with the de facto plant manager and quality manager and I tried to find out when we were getting more people to our understaffed shift and what my continuing role was going to be seeing as the third shift supervisor was all set to start training on first shift starting Monday. I tried to explain that I couldn’t do both jobs and apparently they agreed.
Starting Sunday night I’m going back to my regular duties as third shift shipping guy (I don’t know that I have a better title than that) and the third shift supervisor is going back to being supervisor for the time being.
In Other News..
- Today I had my first Fuji Apple. It might be my new favorite kind of apple.
- After some playing with the monitor I discovered many other settings and it looks awesome.
- Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins is starting to grow on me finally.
- My sister gave me a music stand for my birthday and I’m going to give it an exercise today.
- My own exercising is not going well, but my back is feeling better.
Well I’m not set up with this nifty dual screen thing. Actually, at the moment I’m ignoring the laptop screen completely and using it as a keyboard.
I’d like to write a review of the monitor, but I’m not sure what I think yet. At first I liked the colors better, but text didn’t seem very clean. Then I went through a few color profiles and used the Apple Display Calibrator and comparing it to the laptop screen I can’t say one is better than the other, but they are not identical. And while I could go all out and invest in monitor calibration eyes to get both in perfect sync, I’m not sure what the point would be. Display calibration really only seems to make sense if you are designing for print and it is important for what you see on the screen to be exactly what comes out of your high priced printer (which I don’t have).
The problem in designing for the web (and having two monitors side by side reminds me of this now) is that no matter how it looks on your screen, there are thousands of different screens out there with thousands of different settings.
For the most part I’m happy with my new screen. Before buying it I wish I had made a cardboard cutout to see how big it would be because now I’m convinced 22″ (or even 20″) would have been adequet. I suppose that’s the disadvantage of buying online. You can’t see the thing in person. It’s a little disheartening that all the screens are widescreen these days because websites (and that’s what you’re looking at now, right?) tend to be oriented vertically. After getting this screen set up I realized there is an option to rotate the image 90 degrees and have a tall monitor which might be ideal for me. It would take up less footprint on the desk while giving me the same viewing area. However, the monitor doesn’t have (that I can see) and option to rotate the base 90 degrees. About the only way to solve this is with a wall mounted bracket, but I’m not that concerned about it right now.
Now I have to pause and ask myself, “Did I really spend this much time talking about my new monitor? Is someone really going to read all this and care about it?”