Semester Reflections

Semester 2

During my first year of university here at University of Maryland, I have had the opportunity to build relationships with the faculty of the school. One example of this is the relationship I have built up with the TA’s from my ENAE 202 class. I have often stopped by office hours to ask them about concepts that I found puzzling and also ask them for advice for the coming semester and future semesters in aerospace engineering. However, it’s not this easy to build up relationships with all the faculty members that I interact with on a daily basis, for instance my ENAE 202 professor. This professor has made it difficult to reach out and ask simple questions or to build off what other students have asked before you. For in-coming students I suggest that you find ways of making relationships with the faculty to get people who will help you more and know who you are.

The relationships that I have made between me and peers through my artistic interests have been very few. However, through my other interests and classes I have made many friends. This relationship with other students has allowed me to cope with the transition of beginning university and made it easy for me to settle into life on campus. The greatest obstacle that I found when starting these relationships is that  most of the time you are the one that needs to get things going. No one will come up and talk to you, you have to be the one that starts things. For those who will be freshmen next year, I advise you to make friends in all of your classes. This way you can get help when studying or when you don’t understand a subject.

From my personal experience I have found that Arts Scholars has been able to foster a community and artistic engagement pretty well. For example, the Arts Scholars program always pushes students to be part of a group, they do this through workshops and small group talks. Art Scholars also want students to share their art work with the other students in the program, and again they do this through workshops and small groups, but they also have exhibitions of artworks, and post students' artwork online. Art Scholar fosters artistic engagement through their classes and through their field trips which allows students to experience art works or performance that they probably would have never seen on their own. In the future I plan to contribute to the Arts Scholars community by helping my peers and the next year's freshmen.

This first year of Art Scholars has shown me to open my mind to what art can be. Art can be anything you want it to be, it could be something that invokes lots of feelings or thoughts, or it could be something that was made just to be made, something without a purpose. Future Arts Scholars might expand their own definition of what art means depending on what the culture of the world is like then, because life influences art.

From my perspective of learning over this semester, I found that the workshops and field trips to be the most beneficial in supporting my work. This is because both provide me with lots of inspiration, either just ideas and  concepts, or sometimes mediums of what art could be. The way that incoming Art Scholars could get the most out of their experience in the program is by trying to find things that program offers that will give you inspiration.