I’ve always been “aesthetically conscious”. As pretentious as it may sound, my obsession with leading a visually pleasing life has played a massive role in developing my sense of self. My earliest memory of this revelation dates back to a seventh grade English assignment: create a board game based off of Greek mythology depicted in the Iliad. While most of my peers spent hours drawing squares onto scissor-cut sheets of card-stock, I enlisted the help of my professional graphic designer mother to create an intricate, commercial grade board game which I so cleverly titled “Mythopoly”. Sitting next to my mom and watching her slowly begin to fill an empty InDesign document with ideas that once existed only in my head, a surge of excitement rushed through me. Gradually, I began to approach every artistically-driven school assignment with the same desire to create something “better” than that of my peers’. While “better” is a completely subjective term, I did strive to make my work positively stand out from everyone’s around me in terms of professionalism and creativity. Once I entered high school, my desire to create well-designed school projects evolved into an eagerness to design anything I possibly could. Upon entering my sophomore year, I began conducting my own research on potential colleges and universities that offer the type of learning, and living, environments that could foster my creative and ambitious nature. Through exploring different schools, I realized I needed to pursue secondary educational opportunities while still in high school in order to reach my full creative potential. The various pre-college programs I’ve attended, along with my high school’s impressive art department, truly changed my perspective on the process of design; good design is more than just aesthetic. I have learned how to conceptualize pieces through research, brainstorming, and the realization that not everything I create will be “better” than everyone else’s. Learning the fundamentals of art and design has given me the confidence to explore mediums outside of my computer screen, ultimately strengthening my abilities as a designer. This surge of confidence has also provided me with the humility that I have so much more to learn and discover. My unquenchable thirst to discover new ways of approaching a question through visual analysis has ultimately driven me to pursue an art school education.
