#14 days left of the semester and i am on the verge of giving up | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

emotionalsupportaudino · 5 years

Text

literally me just complaining

I am very genuinely hurt by the treatment my school gave me in the three years I was there. This is my gentle full on vent. This is me getting out my incredible pain in a timeline.

When I went to NCC, my mental health was literally improving in strides. Two years and I walked out confident, happy, assured of my own worth. It was such a great school. I had such great friends! I was losing weight, I was running 5ks every day in the summertime, I was learning to love myself.

And then I started at Moore. My first year, my first day, my first class, I walk in at 8:30AM ready to fucking learn. I have my notebook, my flash drive, and my confident spirit. Here I was. I was at this fantastic school. All my professors at NCC were so proud of me for getting there. I was in a class studying my absolute favorite topic of my major: Character Design.

My professor walks in, six months younger than me and with a chip on her shoulder. She tells us that if we’re not pulling all nighters every project, we’re failures. She tells us we have an assignment worth 20% of our grade due the next Friday. A 4-person set of silhouettes from a fairy tale that make each character clearly defined as their characters. She gives us a rubric and only explains 80% of it. I ask about the other 20% and she responds “Oh I’m not grading on that, don’t worry.”

Anxious about this huge chunk of my grade, I skip out on a free music festival with my NCC friends and spend every night until midnight working on this project. I go through dozens of iterations of silhouettes for my characters. And then, I turn it in, and I barely pass. Because she gave me a 1/5 in the section of the rubric I asked her about. I ask her why? “These are too identifiable. They’re too obviously what they are.”

She continues this to the point where the rest of my semester is a fucking blur. I was miserable, having mental breakdowns once a week, and this lasted for about two months before I dropped the class because I was literally on the verge of killing myself.

She puts down every aspect of my personality, my very being. I worked in cut paper when I was at NCC and I did really well at it. I tell her I like working with shapes and it was my specialty at my previous school, she tells me “It doesn’t look like it.” I tell her my favorite games are Persona 3 (this is before 5 comes out) and We Know the Devil. She says the artist behind WKTD is a bad person and no one should play it, and that Persona is bad because why would any adult want to play as a teenager. She catches me listening to Love Live music and makes fun of my taste. When I had thought too hard about my project (a chimera where she literally threw an entire in-depth illustration at us the night before it was due and required us to pay fare to the zoo or she’d take 50% off our grade, WHEN I HAD LITERALLY JUST RECEIVED MY FIRST PAYCHECK and had almost nothing), and had everything about this animal planned, she asks me: “What’s the Latin name?” It was not mentioned anywhere on the sheet, it wasn’t involved at all. She docked me 5% for not knowing Latin

I seek out help, first, from my head faculty. I tell him the things she tells us. He says “oh I’ll talk to her, but that’s just how she teaches.” She comes in the next class talking about how much he praised her and how great she’s doing. She’s even worse to me. I cry in the bathroom for half the class and the head of first year classes catches me and literally lets me cry on her despite the fact I am not in any of her classes and tells me to drop. So I do.

My classmates for the rest of the semester are miserable. Everyone except for me and 3 others in my program are literally miserable for the rest of the semester. She cost kids their scholarships. One of my friends is so bad that literally the mention of this professor’s name causes her to have a panic attack. I accidentally caused one and felt awful.

This professor is the start of my Xanax dependence. And she’s never disciplined.

In the same semester they start teaching 2D animation. Except by start I mean start and finish. We are expected to know everything about 2D animation in one semester. We are never offered another class.

My second semester, two of my classes are taught by a man who DOESN’T KNOW THE PROGRAM and is teaching it to himself as we go along. He smells of alcohol, and at the end of the semester he disappears during critiques. We have to teach ourselves everything, except, SURPRISE. One of the classes is 3D modeling, teaching us the foundations of Maya.

We never learn the foundations of Maya.

Third semester, first of junior year, we find out the school has lied to us from the getgo. After saying every student got 1k for their internships, we find out students get $500. And the other $500 goes right to the school if you paid by month like I did.

We also find out that everything we didn’t learn in our modeling class was super important. Our professor--THE HEAD OF OUR PROGRAM--gives up teaching us and kinda says to do whatever for our 3D Animation class. I ask him how to do several things specifically (2D animation on a 3D model being one of them). He does not know how. He does not bother to learn.

During that semester, my grandfather dies. I am told by my Admissions department job that if I miss more than one day of work for the funeral, I will be fired. I never got time to mourn. I still miss my grandfather. I cried about his death literally every day from October to May.

Second semester of Junior year is a blur because I am having so many panic attacks. I find an internship, but it’s outside of my typical field. That internship saves my life. And that’s barely exaggerating. I hadn’t felt happiness in a year when I started it and suddenly every day was... exciting again. I made friends, I had fun, I felt human.

First semester of Senior year is... rough. But not overly rough, mostly because I’m only taking two classes. And one of them is with one of the three (3) competent teachers I had teach me my studio classes. It’s great. I genuinely enjoy working despite thesis.

I had won a grant in the spring of my Junior year to travel abroad for two weeks at the beginning of September. My head of program swears he will present my game and get feedback. I return and he says there was no feedback. I ask my classmates--he never presented. I never got critique on my concept until three months into it because I thought everyone knew what I was doing.

Second semester of senior year was the worst four months of my life. I had never been so hurt, so ignored, and so honestly lost.

-My senior thesis class is taught by a woman who has no experience in any of the programs we are using. She has never animated in 2D or 3D. She has never programmed or designed a game before. She keeps asking for more work because she doesn’t understand that the 12 hours a week I’m putting in in coding is seriously beginning to harm my health.

-The same professor teaches the modern culture of Animation/Game Arts class. She refuses to touch on queer subjects. Repeatedly. She drops the hbomberguy stream but knows nothing about it. I wind up being the one who had to explain what it was about.

-She requires us to take a trip to New York and doesn’t get funding for us. This includes transportation there and back, subway fare, tickets to events, and meals. Had she mentioned it to ANYONE in administration, we would’ve gotten free meals. She did not. She left most of my class alone in New York City with literally no idea where to go and no instructions on how to get back. That trip cost me nearly $100 in the end. (I did get to see the original Taminella puppet at the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of Moving Image, and the costumes from Labyrinth, which was totally worth it and I broke down crying at it because like, Jim Henson means the world to me? I want to be like him. I just want to make the world a little brighter.)

-Oh did I mention we were never fully taught C#, and yet I was expected to code an entire game in it because for my thesis I wanted to combine 2D art and gameplay? Yup. She didn’t know that either.

-They refused to let us know anything about setup for Senior show until less than 2 weeks before hand. We had to pay for anything installed for the show and any decor. Every other major knew at least a month in advance. We had less than 14 days.

-I walked in on my one friend about to harm themself more than once. I found others saying they were on the verge of suicide. I comforted more people than I think I ever should have had to in those last 4 months. Whenever I asked for help, I was met with a door in my face.

DESPITE ALL OF THAT I have a deep love for my underclassmen. I genuinely want the fucking best for them. They’re in that hellhole and they deserve better, and I want to be as much help to them as possible. Our major has no connections in the paid art world.

Last March, due to my work in the library (AGAIN THAT INTERNSHIP SAVED MY LIFE ), I was offered a job teaching game design to kids in an underserved area. It’s good pay and great work and great people. So when they said “We need more people,” I immediately said “Let me get in contact with my school.”

The head of the program and his full time faculty both REFUSED to either answer emails or meet with me and my job leads. It’s good fucking work. I love every second of it. I’m happy doing it. And I know I have classmates who would be happy too.

And they’re refusing to meet with me.

Everyone else I came in contact with at the school was happy to see me again. The deans were happy, my old bosses were happy, my career center was happy, my old classmates were happy!

But it stings to be rejected like that after busting my ass for three years to do my best.

I just... I feel like I’m never enough for anybody. And the damage they did to my mental (and physical) health is irreversible. I got addicted to anxiety medications, I’m struggling to be confident in myself, I literally get told almost daily at work to not do the things the program drove into me.

I’m getting better and learning to be okay again, but... I’m really fucked up by this school. And I don’t know what to do.

(Oh and the school counselor apparently didn’t actually have a license to practice and often told me my anxiety was in my own head and that it was my own fault bad things were happening to me. Like deaths in the family. And the way my teachers treated me.)

#cw: Suicidal ideation #i am okay #this is talking about years ago #if you're a student at my old school currently #heed my warning

1 note · View note