Being the Dumbest Person In the Room, Means You’re In the Right Room

During admissions, I was told that the ETC recruits 40% artists, 40% programmers, and 20% of random people that are the “binding glue.” I was to fall into the 20%, which meant 1) that it would be harder for me to get in and 2) that when I got in, I would be behind in skill sets.

When I got in, I found the latter to be definitely true.

I was assigned as an Artist in Building Virtual Worlds (BVW). BVW is a semester-long course where you work in two week design sprints with alternating teams of five students (two programmers, two artists, and one sound designers) to build original virtual worlds that fulfill different objectives. As an artist, my role was to provide art for the worlds, which meant that I had to learn to 3D model, texture, rig, and animate in one week.

I cried during my first week. I was sick. This was hard. After having been out of school for three years, it was difficult to make an adjustment back to school mentality.

I spent the entire Labor Day weekend trying to complete my first assignment: 3D modeling a dragon. Which is just about as hard as it sounds if you’ve never done it before. I spent four hours just trying to open a file in Photoshop.

While I struggled to complete this assignment, many other artists around me were done in a few hours. Some artists even made two dragons! I had strong doubts that I didn’t belong in the program.

But at the end of the weekend, with a LOT of help from my peers, I did it.

Since that weekend, I’ve become a much better artist. I modeled an entire purgatory underworld, Evel Knievel rubber ducks, and an office scene with at least 30 inanimate objects. Granted at first, my models weren’t so great (my 3D clouds looked like literal poop), I learned a ton, and I learned it really fast. I’m really surprised about how far I’ve come, and I have to thank my peers for that.

While being the dumbest person in the room can be scary and intimidating, it helps when you’re surrounded by people who are willing to teach you. One of the most valuable resources that we have at the ETC is actually our peers. While I’ve learned high concepts from my professors, my peers have been the ones to explain to me how to correctly UV map, paint skin weights, and keyframe animations.

As a lifelong learner, the scariest thing for me isn’t being the dumbest person in the room, it’s being in a place where I have no one to learn from.

TL;DR Not knowing what you’re doing is ok.

Grad School Is Weird, Man

If I could describe the ETC program in one word it would be: WEIRD. And HARD.

On our first day of class, we built towers out of spaghetti. Last week, we learned how to juggle. This week, I debuted as Angela from American Beauty and learned to seduce men in improv.

Our team wrecking the competition at a spaghetti + marshmallow building contest.

I knew my program was going to be nontraditional, but I didn’t think it would be this weird.

And the weirdest thing is that the weirdness is what makes this hard. With traditional assignments, there’s usually only one right answer. But with the assignments that we receive, there’s an infinite number of possibilities. And we’re tasked with thinking of the infinite outside of the infinite, to go beyond what’s already been done. Which means that a lot of what we end up making ends up being…well, weird.

What I’ve learned from this daily exercise of thinking outside of the box is that:

1. Creativity is a muscle.

   Being creative is not an easy task. It takes practice. I used to think that some people were just more creative than others. In reality, being creative is a muscle that you have to exercise everyday to get better and stronger. And trust me, the ETC is giving me a really good workout.

2. Creativity comes when you say yes.

   It’s really easy to poke holes in other people’s ideas. It’s really hard to help fix them. Saying yes to other people’s ideas even when you see the flaws, can actually be surprisingly productive.

3. Creative potential is unlimited.

   I sometimes feel like I’ve hit a wall, like I have no more good ideas left. It’s about ten ideas past that point, that I start to actually come up with the best ideas.

Although this program is a little bit painful, and a lot a bit weird, I am so excited for what I’ll come up with in the next two years. I hope it’s weirder than my wildest imaginations.

TL;DR Weird builds creativity.