Lots of excited and peppy freshmen in so-called elite colleges are just too happy to share their thoughts on the college admissions process. It was hard for them. They took twenty AP classes they didn’t care about. They stayed up nights studying for their SATs, only slept half an hour to go to crew at 6 AM the next day, spent the rest of the day prepping for their mathathon and biologybee, and all the other nerdy things they thought they needed for college. I am so sick of hearing all of it. On the rare occasions that I read the news or pass by a bookstore, all the SAT books and stories of how to get into Hahvard or Cornell bog me down— but never has the press even whispered to my ears about the struggles of the art students and the art school admissions process. This alternative admissions process is generally hush-hush—I suppose it’s getting more hype with shows like Project Runway—but its presentation in the media is just as real as gay men of Will and Grace. The art school admissions process is really a lingering path of conformity and bittersweet passion to rise to the top.
On Going to Big Name Art High Schools
            I begged my mother to be enrolled at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (LaGuardia for short)- the Manhattan public school Mecca for high school students interested in any field of art. There are far too many famous alumni to list. She saw the realistic problems of commuting and flat out refused to let me go. I am sure many other kids face the problems of not being able to go to a school because of commuting. People have different thoughts on how far (literally) a person should go to pursue their dreams. I think four hours of traveling a day, five days a week, for four years is not worth the dream; there are alternatives. Anyway, despite my lack of firsthand experience at LaGuardia, there is the formal portfolio review and all of the classes that follow upon admittance. The best way to describe it is that it is the equivalent of Stuyvesant High School, only much more focused on arts. The courses are rigorous and projects are many. Students can be awake at 2 AM, resembling coal miners with charcoal all over their faces and grimy black soot stained into their fingers, toiling at their drawings. Not everyone who is a big shot in art goes to LaGuardia, but it sure helps in applications.
On Art Cram School and Conformity
            I started going to a really upscale and expensive cram art school that prepared high school students for art colleges. Expensive art portfolio prep schools and classes are SAT prep courses for art students. Students who attend these schools get in to Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons, Fashion Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts, Cooper Union, and other art colleges on full scholarships. These art portfolio prep schools are roughly thirty dollars an hour and most kids attended the schools for twenty hours a week. Even art, with all of its claims for uniqueness and creativity reaches conformity when it comes to visual art cram schools. The instructors assign the same task for every student (everyone had to do a number of still life drawings and self-portraits) but allow everyone to work at their own pace. My technical artistic skills increased by tenfold by studying at one of these schools, but I couldn’t express myself in any of my pictures anymore. The instructor would go around to each student and point out errors in perspective and “suggestions” to make the work better. At art cram schools, there is a strange trend of everyone’s works looking exactly the same—they shift toward the instructor’s tastes. There may be numerous works hung up all over the walls, but they look as though they are made by the same hands. Ironically, when I was in art cram school, I felt that I needed to draw the way everyone else did to keep my artistic identity. I hated myself for my lack of skills in comparison to others and was always jealous. Like everyone else in the class, I drew everything so that the instructor would be pleased with my work. I don’t think students can leave art cram school unscathed without having a crowd-pleaser mentality.
On Competition and Selling Out
            Another step in the admissions process is winning many art competitions. The more you win, the better you look for admissions and the fatter your wallet gets. I entered a lot of competitions in New York and won a lot of money, but the actual work I submitted was absolutely meaningless to me. I made all of my works thinking of how the judges would want it for contests and how well it would grab the public attention for advertisements. Of course I didn’t give a crap about Coca-Cola, the Olympics, and smaller name companies for which I submitted advertisements and drawings—it was all about the money. I was really no longer part of the work I made and my identity was doing what people expected from me. I would spend days just painting and drawing away for art contests and awards but I would hate it because I hated selling myself and hated the idea that I was forcing myself to do crap I didn’t care about just for money and acceptance. I knew that I wasn’t in the run for my appreciation of visual arts anymore when I started losing a lot of contests. It was starting to get obvious that I didn’t care about my subject matter and I hated visual arts for how it shaped my identity. A lot of students in visual arts struggle to make a living because they don’t want to sell out.
            High school and college art competitions exist because they are trying to prep students for what art is like in the real world of jobs. Very few artists can support themselves expressing themselves just by selling their works in galleries. Some people get by living expenses by becoming professors and selling their works, but the majority of the jobs are the commercial ones. Advertisements and commercial designs are much less about the artist and more about what the company has in mind for the public. An artist’s expression is no longer his or hers anymore. Many students swallow this and take on the jobs. Others struggle by holding odd jobs and trying to make a break.
On Portfolio Reviews
            People love the television shows America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway because of the instantaneous pass/no pass idea. It’s somewhat like that in the visual arts college process and it’s cutthroat reality in employment. It isn’t much fun for students who have portfolio review sessions because a lot of times, what the critics have to say ultimately decides whether they are in for the art program or not. A student builds up a portfolio: a collection of his or her best artworks to present to art programs, college, and employment. Colleges hold Portfolio Review days for high school juniors to give suggestions for improvement—but more so to screen them for recruitment. Portfolio Review days are really just like cast-and-calls for students. Students take a number and wait hours on line to meet with college representatives to show them the portfolio. If students are really skilled, the college representative will love them, shower them with offers of scholarships on the spot and they keep in contact. If they aren’t very good, students will be given suggestions and quietly dismissed.
            The waiting time is actually the worst part of the review. It is really horrible because the line moves slowly and you are sometimes forced to see students around you bragging about their works. Then you mentally check if your work is better and if it isn’t, you feel bad about yourself. As you get closer to the room of panelists, you actually see the rejected or accepted faces of previous students and end up doing another mental check of how your works compared to theirs and wonder about your outcome. It really gives students anxiety.
On Still Life—Conformity Still Follows
            Taking as many college courses as you can before actually going to college also helps getingt into the art college of your dreams. I attended many courses at Cooper Union.  The drawing class I was in was eight hours long with an hour lunch break in between—but more importantly, it was a still life drawing class. At this point in my life, I just about had it with still life drawing. It was bad enough that for all the contests I entered I would have really no say in the theme or subject material but I absolutely burned the idea that I would have to stare at a damn chair or a bunch of blocks and draw them as accurately as possible. I always argued with my professors that if I wanted a replica of the pointless still life I had, I would take a photo. I was drawing cubes on a three by three piece of paper for six hours when I snapped. I was so pissed with the pointless shit I was doing that I smeared over the cubes and drew a picture with a hand stabbing the cubes—sort of an illustration of the death to still life. The professor walked over to me, looked at my drawing and said in a sickly sweet tone, “What part of that [pointing at the cubes] do you see here [pointing at my drawing]? I don’t see any. Erase all of it.” Cooper Union is the landlord of the Chrysler building, so it gets a LOT of money, meaning they have all the art supplies they could possibly want. To the right of my professor and me, there was a two-foot stack of free paper. I asked her if I could just get a new piece of paper and start over, but she said no, my completely covered 18” x 24” paper was fine to erase. She gave me a small stick of eraser and made me spend the rest of the class and three hours after that just erasing. I was supposed to be just a blank sheet of paper, only filling myself with what the observer wanted to see.
On Loving Visual Arts For Its Sake
            I walked away from the highway of visual arts by coming to MIT. The problem is that today, I still have that I-am-an-empty-canvas-waiting-to-be-filled-by-acceptance mentality. Some people try to convince others that basing your identity on what other people feed you and how they grade you is not how it is in the real world. But it is—at least in visual arts.
            Some visual artists, musicians, and performing artists keep their expression completely unscathed by desires for money and fame; these people who appreciate art just for itself are remarkable and few. I have great respect for these people who keep their work completely detached from praise and financial issues, but I also have tremendous respect for people who work in commercial arts who detach their own thoughts from their product. I know too many people who give up their unique expression in art to launch ad campaigns and make deadlines for thirty grand a year.
            The bottom line is that artists are not in their profession for the money. Before artists decide to go to college for art, they have to accept that unless they have money from an outside source, they will most likely not be driving a Porsche. After all, most students make about half of the MIT tuition a year when they get out of college. They must also accept that criticism is normal and everything that they make will not be welcomed with open arms. Artists must know that competition is gruesome and their dreams and the sight of the finished product alone must be enough to satisfy them. An artist must really love visual arts.