The Scholarship Essays
Recently I’ve been writing for several scholarship applications, and I’ve seen a trend in the prompt questions. It goes something like, “Why do you want to go to college? What are you going to gain from it? How is a post-highschool education going to further your career?”
And it’s a good question.
Maybe less so for future Doctors and Lawyers and Engineers because their answers are obvious: “I’m going because it’s required for my career to have an education beyond high school.” For an artist the question is really fun.
It’s fun because I say “Well, I don’t actually need college. It could easily be viewed as a waste of time in my profession of choice.”
Art Majors have a 7.3% dropout rate. And hey, if those people really want to be artists even after they dropout, they can be. Formal education is not at all required for art, and that’s why this question intrigues me. An education can help, sure, but only if you learn things that you are actually going to apply. If I was going into welding art, a workshop on paper-making isn’t going to help me. (For me, paper-making is actually applicable because of my paper-based medium, but it was just an example) Some students may just pick the wrong classes and get discouraged that way. Art is quite difficult to limit to those with access to a higher education.
Here are a few of the prompts I responded to with my answers:
Why is education after high school important?
Formal education in the field I intend to enter is not important. To be an artist that succeeds is to have a market, and a way to fill that market with a certain type of art, well. No formal education required. I still plan to attend a university after college to study studio arts, but not necessarily to learn about art. I will grow tenfold as an artist not because I'm at a place of higher education, but because there is an atmosphere of growth around me with students like myself growing and learning with me. I will grow because I will be exerting an awfully large amount of effort into my work as an art major, and that effort itself will initiate the growth. College is a structure, and a structure I as an infant to the world of adulthood, need. Without the structure I would surely crumble and fall chasing my dreams. With the structure I will be built up to greater and greater things.
How will you use an education after high school to achieve your career goals and contribute to your community?
Schooling when it comes to art is quite unlike other fields. To become an engineer you must thoroughly understand all required math, and to become a doctor you absolutely need to understand the human body and the procedures you are performing. Schooling is necessary for engineering and medical fields. An artist however, just creates. The title is so broad that literally anybody can fit it. No formal education required. Sure, it helps to have certain certifications for jobs, and portfolios and resumes and the standard things. But it isn't required. An artist does whatever they feel like doing, and they do it well and with their whole soul. Whatever an artist decides to do, there only needs to be a market and a pathway to that market set for them to succeed. What I want to accomplish through my education is an improvement of my soul. If an artist produces outwardly what is within them, then I want what is within me to be the best it can be. I plan to be not only a part of the art department at my school of choice, but also a part of their honors program. Their honors program asks questions like "What is Beauty?" and "What is the Good Life?" and through it, the students tackle the hard questions that often go unanswered in people's souls. I will be learning art as an art major, of course- I will be learning new processes, and making new connections, and figuring out what works for my own creative process and what doesn't. But I will also be learning how to collaborate. How to work with my peers in creating true meaning through art. Meaning that mirrors an improved soul. Through my education I hope to improve as an artist, but synonymously, as a person- as an individual. Art education isn't required to be an incredible artist, so through my art education I instead hope to become an incredible person.
What would you like to study or train for after high school? How did you get interested in this field? Tell about any jobs, internships, or volunteering you have done in your area of interest. What motivates you to enter this field (such as, good salary, fascination, concern for people, etc.).
I want to be an artist because I love art, have loved art, and always will love art. Really, that's all there is to it, but I guess I'll explain.
Artists don't really decide if they're good at art. They instead, get told they're good at art. The elementary teacher peeks over a shoulder and sees the student is actually getting it. They actually understand how blue and green makes purple, and how to color outside the lines. Their coil pots are lopsided and their portraits are picasso. (Funny how it's the opposite, because art just as well may be described either way.) Who are they to think they can determine what is good? If the child says it's a dragon, then it's a dragon. Whether it really looks like one is irrelevant. My dragons looked like dragons though, so I knew I was an artist. Now I know I was just lucky.
I've been extremely lucky in more than one regard. Namely, my access to supplies and teachers and learning experiences. I've had the elementary, middle, and high school art teachers to tell me the best way to shade a sphere. I've had the pencils and knives at home to cut my cardboard. I know where to go for help. Not everyone gets that. Not everyone gets a part-time job at their local library at which they get to lead a half dozen workshops teaching cereal box crafts to kids. Not everyone gets to teach a high school intro art class for a week. Not everyone has an art blog by sixteen to share their ideas with the world. I've been extremely lucky. And I want to be extremely creative.
I want to keep making art because I love it, not because everyone says I'm good at it. I want to attend university for studio arts not necessarily to learn more about how everyone else thinks art should be made, but rather to learn what is not being done. I want to look at a process they teach me and try to turn it on its head and do that instead. With my one crazy, wonderful life, I want to love art.
It’s funny how these scholarship prompts-generally-are asking questions as if the teens the questions are targeting have a single clue what their life is going to be like. We don’t. I know I’m going to be hit by a metaphorical brick wall going 60 on a freeway one day and I’m going to have to change my course entirely. That’s life.
But I do enjoy these little dreams called essays. These figments of imagination and planning and interpretations of my life through my eyes. When I answer, I don’t really know what I’m saying, and if I did it’d be impossible to completely portray it in a few hundred words. What I can do is paint a partial picture of what I think happened, or what I think I believe, or what I think may happen, and show this snippet to the scholarship people
and hope I get some money out of it.
