Help me find a college (please!)
This is very long, but if you feel like helping a fellow Doper out, I’ll be eternally grateful.
I am looking for a college to attend starting in the spring(january) or fall(august) semester of 2005. What follows is a longwinded ramble inspired by my dead-end searching the last couple weeks. I am hoping that the board, with it’s seemingly high number of intelligent college grads can help me out. If you want to suggest a school but it doesn’t meet all of my picky little demands, please do it anyway!
about me:
21 year old female, graduated HS in 2001, one year of College under my belt. It’s been two years since I left school (Maryland Institute College of Art for any Baltimore dopers). My interests include comic books (reading and making), movies (watching) and books of all kinds. I am also a sketchbook fiend, having just finished the 5th in a series that began on my last day at MICA. I have learned to really work in the last two years, juggling 40-hour weeks at the day job with running a business. After that, I think being able to spend all of my time on homework and related projects would be heavenly. Plus, I now have a drive to make something of myself in a way I never did before.
I did very well in school, graduating at the top of my High School class, and maintaining a decent GPA for my two semesters at MICA. I have always been good at passing classes by feeling out exactly what a teacher wants and playing to that, and I left MICA because I realized that I was wasting a chance at a perfectly good education by doing just that. I could see myself graduating after four years of hassle and expense with nothing to show for it.
Another reason I left was that my boyfriend and I lived off-campus (he came along with me from upstate NY) and found life in Baltimore incredibly dificult to deal with, cut off from the support structure of friends and family we were used to back home. In the end, it was impossible to justify our misery in light of my above misgivings.
In the two years since I left MICA, I have worked in two bakeries (I loved cake decorating!), with my mother in her management service for nonprofits (where I learned how to write grants and deal with boards in the stinking cess-heap that is the american 501©3), and currently work at a Salvation Army Thrift store (talk about a cess-heap!)
Apart from paying the bills, my boyfriend and I started a business from scratch (my semi-estranged father bankrolled it, saying that if we made the money back he’d be ahead, and if not it was better than giving it to a “snooty private school.”) Well, the business officially tanked a month ago, due to the loss of a third partner and a crummy local economy (watch out, Utica! Springfield is a town on the GROW!!) and I think I am ready to go to college again, for real this time.
What I want from a college:
I still want to major in Fine Arts, but not at an exclusively Arts college. One of my main goals in college is to get much better at both drawing and writing comics. I don’t really want to do a Sequential Art program, I’d rather cherry-pick among visual arts and writing/literature classes and put it together myself, but some explicitly comics-oriented classes would be a definite bonus. Another thing I want out of college is to learn Japanese, and would like to go to a school which offers it as a minor. I want this partially to further my comics study, partially as an interesting challenge, but mostly with an eye to spending some time in Japan in the future. I have a few friends there who have really piqued my interest in all things Japanse.
Here’s my nitpicky list of dream qualifications:
). Are you currently at IU? How is Dr Peters doing? You can tell Professor Hollingsworth (if he is still there) to kiss my …!