the thawts

all right, so i thought i would share my more personal feelings about college. it is the weirdest experience i think i have been through. a person usually thinks about what they want to do, but i really feel like i have to choose and decide right now. it's really scary. it's almost worse for me because i have to choose between art school or simply a liberal arts school. of course, others have worked harder to achieve dreams of Stanford or Berkeley, but my decision feels more pivotal.
my decision feels so intense because i just spent a month this summer at an art pre-college program and my teacher told me he would rather hire an art director who went to an art school instead of a liberal arts school. not that that is the job i am looking for, but it doesn't encourage me to go to a liberal arts school.

a very, very large part of me wants to attend a liberal arts college because i want a broad education. i want to be able to take physics classes and spanish classes. art schools do not, as i understand, provide the most stimulating academic classes.
so i find myself torn between an intense art world that i think i would come to love and possibly could learn to live in and a liberal arts education leading to a more general lifestyle of management instead of illustrator (as i am considering now).
when it come down to it, i want both. i see myself as a traitor to academics and a traitor to art. i am not welcome in either world, i do not fit into either world entirely and it leaves me pondering what will be best for my future.

both sides pull me from day to day: i love making art, but doubt i have what it takes to make it in the art world, i just don't care about the art world enough to actually pay attention.
while on the other hand: liberal arts is safe and will allow me to try more things out before figuring out what i want to do with my life.

i just looked over this post and it doesn't really describe how lost i feel and how hopeless this feels. i want to go to art school, but i do not know how i will do in an artist's lifestyle. when i tell people i honestly do not believe i could make it as an artist, it comes from an honest evaluation of my work compared to others around me. yes, yes, i hear a chorus of "don't compare yourself to others" resounding in my head, but art is something everyone can do and i feel stupid as me trying to even compete with those people who have more talent and drive than i do. it seems a hopeless case. i am not giving up, but it feels hard to push yourself when you are an average girl who is only okay at everything, instead of so many around me with passion and love and devotion for so many different things.

the realization

today i was thinking about my blog and realized that i had not looked at "my colleges" on naviance (the website my school uses to connect our family to school information, mostly centered around colleges, i will put a link below if you want to check it out or are confused)... anyway i had not looked at that list while making my last list, so i had forgotten about other schools that I was wanting to look into.

http://www.naviance.com/parents-students/what-is-it.html

an updated list of schools i am looking into:
Art Institute of Boston
Wesleyan
Lewis & Clark
Moore College of Art and Design
Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
Mass. College of Art and Design
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Pepperdine
Art Institute of Pittsburgh
University of Caslifornia San Francisco
Cornish College of the Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Reed
Ontario College of Art and Design

the list

schools i am applying to for sure:
University of California Santa Cruz
Maryland Institute College of Art

schools i need to visit (but am 95% sure i'm applying to):
Oberlin
Puget Sound
Washington University in St. Louis
CSU Long Beach
California College of the Arts

schools i am considering applying to:
Stanford (note here: i mostly want to apply for funsies to see if i can get in with art and legacy)
Berkeley
CSU Monterey

schools i am looking into:
Art Institute of Boston
Wesleyan
Lewis & Clark
Moore College of Art and Design
Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Pacific Northwest College of the Arts

the beginning

So the college search sucks, but is really exciting and interesting at the same time. A significant part of why it sucks(besides essays, stress and standardized testing) is that everyone asks you questions about it, which is why I am choosing to blog about it.

Ah, the internet.

At this moment I am somewhat into my college search. I have a good list of possible places to apply to, which I will post at some point, and I have some idea of where I am heading in the career world. With that said, the essays scare my shitless because I hate writing essays and feel that I have nothing much significant to write about my life. This is going to be an interesting journey into my brain...