Semester Reflections

Semester 3

My time in Arts Scholars has been influential in how I’ve started to see the world around me. I’ve learned that art reshapes our history and beliefs by putting emotion behind the basic facts shown through watching Jake Shimabukuro reshape classic songs by playing them on his ukelele with a fierceness I’ve never seen in song, showing just how emotional those songs really are to him. I’ve found that the creative process begins by recognizing something that is of importance to you being impacted by the world, such as when my creative process for my capstone began when I heard someone describe something as bipolar. Also, I’ve discovered that to effectively incorporate feedback, one needs to take the feedback all the way to the root of the issue, rather than just trimming off the ends, such as when I was given the feedback that my definition of “entertainment media” was too broad, which made me realize that I didn’t have the types of medias in mind for my project rather than me just needing to reshape my definition. Overall, my ability to think through my creativity as a process rather than just a destination has been impacted very positively by my time in Arts Scholars.

Speaking of art reshaping the world, I’ve run into many articles about people becoming bored with the Millennial Grey style of home design, and decided to make a more colorful, vibrant house. My time with Arts Scholars helps to explain this trend: there’s a societal issue of people not being able to own houses, so they’ve found unique ways to make their house feel more like a home. The Arts Scholars part shines through in how there’s a societal issue at play, and the art of design is how people are countering that issue; reshaping designs is how people are spreading awareness.

My favorite supporting Arts course I’ve taken has been ENGL275, an introduction to scriptwriting. My favorite part about it wasn’t the scripts that I would write, but the scripts that other people would write, as they could come up with things that I would never have dreamed of in millions of years. The beauty of those differences is that everyone had something they took issue with, and wrote a script exploring that issue, even when that was nowhere near mentioned in the assignment description. That’s just like what I’ve learned in Arts Scholars: most art is based on an issue or something of importance to an artist that they thought was important to share with the world. In both Arts Scholars and that course, the true beauty of art comes from how the artist interprets and interacts with the world.

Interacting with my fellow Arts Scholars improved my learning because I feel like I got to share my ideas and hear feedback on it more often than if I were in a normal classroom setting. For example, I was walking with my roommate Dean (who is also an Arts Scholar) to the workshop previews, and I was explaining what my process would be like for my project; however, Dean noticed that my process would’ve taken me an exorbitant amount of time to complete. Hearing that instant feedback made me realize that I could have optimized my process, and I did; however, it was hard for me to give similar feedback to him because he was working on a workshop, and that’s where the living-learning community fell short. It’s hard to give adequate feedback to people if they’re engaged in a different type of capstone as they know the rubric much better than you, so your suggestions could possibly lead them astray.

My biggest contribution to the Arts program was how I would always volunteer to go first for an activity so I could be a sort of test subject for those I was working with. I did it not to get it out of the way, but more so I could be an example of what to do for the other people working on my activity, such as when we were required to give an elevator pitch on our capstones: I fumbled through it, but my partner saw where I fell short and used that to improve her own presentation! A part of me wishes that I could have done more than just be an example, such as participating in discussions, but most times I fell short on coming up with a timely answer.

There has only ever been one time where my beliefs were challenged in Scholars, and that is when someone claimed that a chair wasn’t art because architecture leans more towards engineering. I thought that a chair was art, and we had a long discussion about both of our sides. Neither of us ended up really changing our minds, but we both were able to see from the other’s point of view, and that’s the value of exploring multiple perspectives: it allows us to become more worldly, for us to care more about the things that other people care about. Communities are built upon how ideas are shaped by those within it, and shapes can’t become multi-dimensional if there’s only one side. Over my time in Arts Scholars, I’ve realized that it’s a community with more than three dimensions.