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kulifefall2019 · 5 years ago

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Being an Art Major at Kutztown

Prologue:

Going to a larger school, the average student will be around art majors. Especially in a school like Kutztown that is known for its art program. (walking across campus, being curious about them, how a student will be living among them, see them in gen eds.)

Kutztown is a large school, and one of the most popular state schools in Pennsylvania. It has many different majors, and some programs its well known for. One of the things Kutztown is famous for its large art program. Whether or not a student is an art major, they’ll see these people all around campus. They share housing buildings, dining halls, and even some general education classes with other students. They’re fairly easy to spot, some of the major things they’re seen with are big portfolio cases, big sheets of paper, drawing on iPads or tablets plugged into a computer, or even just sketching ideas into sketchbooks. To get even more stereotypical, they’re also easy to spot since a lot of them dress differently, or “artsy.” The clothes, unnatural hair colors/styles, artistic makeup make them easy to spot a mile away.

Art majors may seem like a foreign species to non art majors, but a little bit of insight on what the experience of art majors are can make them seem a little more human. Even if a student at Kutztown isn’t an art major, it’s important to know a little bit more about the everyday life of an art major. It’s one of the things Kutztown is best known for. Today we’ll be discussing three acts of an art major at Kutztown with Act I: the cost of being an art major; Act II: Weekends in the Studios; and Act III: Scheduling the Nightmare to really understand the personal lives and struggles of art students.

Act I: The Cost of Being an Art Major

It’s common knowledge that the average college student should prepare to buy expensive textbooks for their courses at the start of their college career. Lately, more and more people buy used books or rent books to cut down the cost of expensive books. At the very least they can sell back their books at the end of the year. With the help of the internet, it’s gotten fairly easy to save money on books. All of this applies to the average Kutztown student. There is however, a group of majors that doesn’t have the luxury of saving money on the required materials for their classes: visual art majors. Visual art majors have to supply almost all of their own supplies for class, including but not limited to sketchbooks, paints, pencils, markers, brushes, printed posters, and the list goes on and on. These supplies are not cheap too, since students have to use something that's more on the professional side.

Every class has a list of supplies that’s needed for the class. Fine arts majors have to buy the physical materials like paints, canvases, papers, etc. from project to project. Communication Design and Applied Digital Arts majors usually have to cover their own printing costs for posters, illustrations, and 3D printing. The 300 credits that is reloaded every semester for black and white printing in the library does not cover color and/or poster printing at all. If students don’t want to have to rely on lab hours to use the school computers and/or would like to work on digital projects at their homes over the breaks throughout the semester, they would have to buy expensive programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, ToonBoom, etc. In addition to that, every single art major has to take the same studio classes their freshman year of college. I personally spent well over a couple hundred dollars on supplies over the course of my first year of college alone, and almost every other freshman has a similar experience.

Now that I’m a sophomore in college as an Applied Digital Arts major, most of the money I spend is on printing and digital supplies like programs, a tablet, a hard drive, etc. Right now I’m using a two month trial of photoshop on my own laptop that came with the hard drive I bought at the beginning of the semester, but once that expires there’s no way I’ll be able to afford keeping it, since it’s based on a monthly subscription fee. If I want my own tablet to use on the school computers without having to rely on continuously renting school tablets out, that’s around $200. And that’s just for my digital classes alone. Applied Digital Arts majors still have to take traditional media classes, like life drawing, painting, etc. Those classes will require a lot of money for supplies as well.

To see how a different art major has to spend their money, I interviewed Haley Wawrzynek, a sophomore in Communication Design. CD is a major that focuses on graphic design and illustration as well. I asked her if she had to print all of her digital projects, and her answer was yes, every single one so far. She said she has to print the most for her Typography class, and that each project costs about $5 to print. That doesn’t sound like much, but so far she’s done five projects and the semester isn’t over yet. She also told me that in her current art history class she had to print a large poster for that as well.

I asked her if she has to spend money in a different studio class, and she answered yes and started talking about her intro to illustration class. “Every two or three weeks he emails us a new list of supplies to buy for our next project,” she tells me. I asked her approximately how much each of these shopping trips costs, and she said it costs about $15 to $20 and that she has 7 projects this semester.

To finish the interview, I then asked how she felt about having to spend so much money as a whole, to which she said “I don’t like it. It’s not cool,” and we both laughed. She then said “spending all this money for college and it’s not going towards utility things that I need for my major.” She said that she wished the prepaid credit that goes towards black and white printing could count for art printing, even if it cost more credits. I agree with her on this, because as art majors we don’t take as many classes that require printed essays, reports, etc. so most of the library credits go unused and wasted.

Overall, the general consensus is that art majors spend a lot of money. A lot. For some single courses it seems that it costs even more than buying a textbook for a single course. Not only does being an art major require a lot of hard work, but it requires a lot of supplies, and therefore money.

-Casey Stoneback

Act II: Weekends In the Studios

Most students that are non art majors have 5 classes that are either 50 minutes or an hour and 20 minutes long. They can start class in the late morning and finish by the early afternoon for the most part, giving them a lot of time to do homework, study, and work on projects. This is not the case for visual arts majors. The average visual arts major has at least three 3 hour long studio classes that meet twice a week. That means that these majors spend approximately 18 hours a week in studio classes alone, on top of having general education classes. All together, that’s about 20 hours a week in classes alone.

Most studio classes often require spending hours in the studio/computer labs outside of class time, so that’s even more time taken out of the week spent on studio classes alone. Since studio classes are so long, usually studios are full of classes from 8 in the morning and don’t end until 9 at night, meaning the studios and labs won’t open up until after 9 (other than weekends). If a student has to work on a project during the week that requires a digital program that’s only on the school computers, or need the space of a painting/drawing studio, they have to wait until 9 and will often stay until 12 to 2 in the morning. Sometimes they stay that late even when they have a 3 hour studio class at 8 in the morning the next day.

All of this time spent in studio classes and the time spent on projects outside of class leave very little time for gen ed classes. I know I often fall behind in my gen ed classes because I simply do not have the time and energy to focus on them because I struggle so much to meet due dates for studio projects. In doing so, these studios make many art students suffer in their other classes because they barely manage to finish their projects for their main studios.

The amount of time and effort that is put in by art students is seen just by looking at the lab hour sign up sheets. It’s rare to see someone sign in to the programs for anything shorter than four hours approximately. These are just the experiences of APD majors. With other programs, many students in other programs stick after class to work on the many projects they are required to do. Such as Fine Arts majors, that spend their times in the painting studios to work such as Fine Arts Student, and sophomore, Dorie Penny whom I interviewed to get truly into the mind of an art student.

When I asked her, “What are your main struggles with time management as an art student?” She laughed nervously and responded “Since I’m in four studios so I feel like I don’t have any personal time. I can manage time for studios but it keeps away time for myself.” After she answered that question I then asked her “have you noticed that your time management has affected your mental health?” For a moment she didn’t know how to answer. She later told me it was because she didn’t really know how to answer it because she had so many feelings about the topic. She later responded “Yes, increasingly. My anxiety increased dramatically. That’s kinda a blanket term for it all though. I’ve have several panic attacks lately.”

She later in the evening mentioned that she wanted to input that “professors will tell you it’s just three out of class hours of work, but you end up having around three times the amount, and that’s just my painting class. I have no time.” And these are the experiences of one art student. We may be given the time to finish our projects but that leaves very little time for ourselves. As you can imagine that seriously takes a toll on your mental and even physical health. The studios drain students drastically and that’s not even half of the problem.

-Casey Stoneback & Gwyneth Trafford

Act III: Scheduling the Nightmare

As an Applied Digital Arts major, Life Drawing is a required class to graduate. There are over 200 students enrolled in the APD program in total. With only two classes available, taught by the same individual, that leaves only about 33 slots to enroll in. Not only do the APD students quickly enroll in, some Business major who needs a Gen Ed will also enter. Clearly, there is a problem here. Art students have to fight tooth and nail to enter a required class that should just be available to them in the first place. It took me three advisement meetings to eventually enroll in Life Drawing, which even then was just pure luck that someone dropped out as soon as we were looking at availability.

Overall, the programing and scheduling in the arts needs work. Some specific individual programs within the arts have some more luck, but overall the scheduling typically is very difficult. In Kutztown, many of the arts programs are understaffed. As such, classes required to graduate fill up quickly. Not only are there not enough classes to compensate for all of the enrolled art students, they also allow non-art majors to enroll in these classes.

Now what is the big problem here? What is the thing making all these students have breakdowns when they sign up for classes? Understaffed, and open classes for everyone. Only one person teaching Life Drawing is gonna leave many problems for scheduling. And that’s just my Life Drawing. I wasn’t the only person to struggle either. Many students, up to six, during my animation class also vocalized their struggles with signing up for classes, and those were the ones vocal about it.

Not only does scheduling affect the students, this also hurts the working teachers. Students flock to their teachers to help with their problems, and even their advisors. During my Animation class, 4 students enrolled during that class period and not a single student was able to get a full schedule of their requirements. Some students, such as myself, couldn't even get two. During our Animation class, many of the students tried to figure out their schedules. There were at least five students in that class who had these struggles, including me. We all asked our professor how on earth we could fix this problem, with her looking at with disappointment as she knew she couldn’t help us. I personally saw another student start to cry, and I even started to tear up. Not only does this take away a large amount of time that we could be working on projects, this also takes up the time and stresses out the teachers who help the students struggle. This puts intense pressure on the students, teachers, and advisors to deal with scheduling.

-Gwyneth Trafford

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