Oh, the kids these days

I've been thinking that when I go to college, I shouldn't have too much trouble with the cultural adjustment. But today Hampshire's admissions propaganda department sent out a link to a student's blog. Apparently the idea was to show us how cool it is to go to Hampshire.

Mein Gott. Reading that makes me feel about a hundred years older than her. And tired. She has a paragraph that I'm guessing has more words in it than this entire blog. I'm not at all sure I'm prepared to use the word "ginormous" or fight over Fruit Roll-Ups with my friends. I haven't even seen a Fruit Roll-Up in a very very long time. And Harry Potter is not even a little bit part of my cultural background—I read the first one and was entirely ungrippèd.

Not that this changes anything. But I hope there are some grown-ups there too, this notwithstanding. Otherwise I guess I will have to hang out with my sister more, just for cultural conditioning...

Ink Studies, refinement of

OK, after hitting the books on this all weekend, things look a little different. The front rank, the schools that appear to have both a strong liberal arts college nature and a very strong (for a liberal arts school) art department (or functional equivalent), are Brown, Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence, and Bard. Macalester and Wesleyan appear to be equally strong as liberal arts colleges but do not quite appear to be in the same class in respect of their art departments. Carleton appears to trail those two by a little bit, again only in the art department. There seems to be a noticeable gap between it and Reed, Grinnell, and Vassar in that category, which I am afraid are definitely in the third rank on that basis.

More disturbingly, it appears that there is no way to get a BFA without being a somewhat-accomplished artist at college-application time, and that the BFA level is where one obtains a real design education (see RISD, Parsons, etc). This is a great injustice, if not a violation of my human rights. I think this will have to be resolved by calling up people in the art department at these schools and asking "how do I become a graphic designer or some such thing if I go to your school?"

Brown has a misnamed Resumed Undergraduate Education program, which applies even to old fogies like myself who are not resuming any undergraduate education but beginning it, just a little later than everybody else. It sounds perfect and wonderful, except that it sends its admission notifications approximately May 1. What happens on May 1? Let's see. It is International Worker's Day for one thing. Anything else? Oh yeah, it's the day when all of the other schools require you to tell them whether you are accepting their admission offers. Does a college application plan consisting of "stake everything on Brown" strike anyone else as, um, brave?

P.S. In the spring of 2005, Bard offered a Foundations: Constructivism class. That is just unspeakably cool.

Ink Studies

I've been starting to go over my college list again, this time with art firmly in mind. I don't know whether I want to major in it, but I certainly want to get much more into the visual arts than I have before. And having some kind of letterpress / book arts facilities and courses would be very cool, too. A brief check, starting from my existing list, shows a few that clearly have this: Bard, Bowdoin, Carleton, Macalester, and Sarah Lawrence for sure, possibly the Amherst colleges via Smith. Still need to find out if us menfolk are allowed to take Smith classes or what. Interesting, though, that Reed, Oberlin, and Grinnell don't seem to, although Reed at least has a wonky, specifically "nontraditional" book-arts class or two. Probably not the decisive factor, but it does keep Bard and Sarah Lawrence high on my list, for sure. A little disappointing about Oberlin. [Update: Reed does have a Reprex letterpress. Missed it the first couple of times. Google to the rescue, naturally.] I'll have to look at the others I mentioned in more depth.

Also, a number of these (have to go back and look again, but Bowdoin, Grinnell, Hampshire, and Oberlin for sure) have preparatory programs for students intending to go into architecture and urban planning. Perhaps not essential, but very helpful, to be sure. And... oh... I have to remember what that one school was that offered a sort of one-year post-undergrad urban-planning prep program. I think it was in New York, for some reason, but NYU doesn't sound quite right. Hmm.

Time to get moving on this, no doubt about it.