Student Life

You are currently browsing the archive for the Student Life category.

Tips for the career-oriented among us

March 1, 2013 in Careers, Student Life | No comments

By Jeremy Kahn

Jeremy Kahn shares tips for the coming Career Fair. Image: Jeremy Kahn

Jeremy Kahn shares tips for the coming Career Fair. Image: Jeremy Kahn

SCAD’s career fair is slowly but surely creeping up. With only a few months left ’till the fair, best start preparing now so you’re all set come April. Be sure to check the Career Fair website which will be live come late February for a list of all participating companies. You’ll be able to view each company’s logo, profile, website and career and internship information.

While searching, you’ll have the ability to sort companies based on majors sought and opportunities for international students. In addition, be sure to conduct independent online research about your companies of interest. SCAD’s Career Fair page also provides preparation tips, and workshops.

When researching what companies to visit, try to remain open-minded. Many of the companies will consider candidates from multiple disciplines.

The Career Fair provides a valuable opportunity to expand your network of contacts across all art and design industries and around the globe. Make sure to do all your research all of your companies of interest in advance and develop a strategy to visit your top companies of interest.

Be sure to dress professionally. Women should wear a dress shirt, dress skirt or pants and closed-toe shoes with a low heel. Men should wear a dress shirt, dress pants and dress shoes. A business suit would be acceptable but not required.

While many creative companies offer a casual work environment, jeans and flip-flops are not appropriate for the Career Fair. You want the employers to focus on your work and professional attributes rather than any distracting attire. When in doubt, speak to your career adviser about the standards for your industry.

Of course, just like your appearance, your work must also be assembled into a well thought-out portfolio. Your portfolio is only as strong as your weakest piece, so you want to ensure you are selecting your most professional and highest-quality work, focusing on quality rather than quantity. Your professors and career adviser can provide critique and feedback for showcasing your strongest work. If you contributed to a team project, employers will want to hear about your specific contributions.

In addition to your portfolio, be sure to bring several copies of your resume printed on a high-quality resume paper. You will also want to bring a business card and/or a leave-behind piece with a link to your portfolio website. Many employers will want to view your portfolio (print or digital) and/or your process book. If you plan to show a digital portfolio, bring your own tablet or laptop and save your work offline. Practice your interviewing skills and be prepared to network.

For business cards there are multiple venues to get them made. You can go the local brick and mortar print shop route or through an online printing company. Make sure to research paper samples and prices to determine the best quality and value for your project. If needed, many print shops offer free paper sample kits by request.

As you conclude your conversation with an employer, mention that you would like to keep in touch and ask if he or she has a business card while offering yours. If an employer gives you a business card, send them an invitation to connect on LinkedIn after the Career Fair to keep in touch.

Thanks to Kimberly Lopez, lead coordinator for Career Fair 2013, for helping answer all questions whose answers were used in the creation of this article.

Good luck and happy job hunting.

The Travel Log: Dubai

February 22, 2013 in Column, Student Life, Travel Log | No comments

By Kathy McCurdy

Dubai is a city under construction. Photo by Kathy McCurdy

Dubai is a city under construction. Photo by Kathy McCurdy

I lived in a construction zone, but everyone in Dubai lives in a construction zone. Apparently the whole of Dubai is only 50% occupied. I would have thought more like 35%. Dark towers of empty offices and apartments are all over.

Half-built planned housing communities with many of the individual structures exposed and unfinished.

You can see concrete blocks, the stuff that houses are made of, hanging out like a skinless chicken breast. Like living in a Costco.

Most of the construction, the bits that are actually finished, is not very interesting at all. It’s like some wannabe architect from the 1980s fell through a black hole and went hog-wild designing the whole town, with lots of brass-n-glass and those odd ’80s silhouettes, all geometric and edgy.

With a couple notable exceptions like the Burj Khalifa – tallest building in the world, until the Saudis stand theirs up anyway – and the Burj al Arab – the gazillion dollar a night hotel shaped like a sail, you can pretty much visualize the Trump Tower in NYC, enlarge that, make it in colors in addition to pink, and there is your basic Dubai.

Take that lovely picture in your mind, plunk it down in the middle of a construction site and sprinkle some cranes, some floodlights, and some pits in and around the buildings – and don’t forget miles of candy-cane k-rail and several band-aid-like strips of highway overpass just standing over you with no ramps up to or down from these concrete “tables”. It’s like an urban Stonehenge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Making connections at NYC Comic Con

October 29, 2012 in Reports From the Field, Sequential Art, Student Life | No comments

So many potential connections, so little time. Photo by Carlos Serrano

By Jeremy Kahn

NY Comic Con, one of the biggest conventions, other than its San Diego counterpart. Dozens of publishers from the comic realm come to entertain the masses and show off their wares.

Also, companies from the world of video-games, TV and other entertainment make appearances. And let’s not forget the multitude of people in costumes.

To be fair, some of them make it hard to forget them.

With so much to see, do and buy, where should your priorities lie?

As a SCAD student, conventions are a great place to make contacts. Before heading out make a list of possible companies to visit during the convention (this will save time later on). Be sure to make a good amount of handouts and business cards with your contact info. Don’t dress too fancy or too sloppy. It’s Comic Con, even the editors and artists you’ll meet are there to have fun. Finally, get your pass and head to the showroom floor.

During the convention I visited a number of publishers, both large and small. I would first ask if they were giving portfolio reviews during the convention. Remember, while not advertised, some publishers will gladly review your work if asked and if they have time.

I managed to get lucky and land an review with Archie Comics. After showing them my work they asked for me to email them later on with a PDF file with higher resolution images of my work. While not guaranteeing a job, they said they’d keep me in mind. Sometimes in this line of work, that’s the first step to a future career.

Read the rest of this entry »

SCAD offers free CS6 download

October 5, 2012 in Briefs, Graphic Design, News, Student Life, Technology | No comments

By Carlos Serrano

It began not with a bang, but with a whisper. One seemingly innocent Twitter post thanking SCAD for a free download of some sort, followed by another one asking how to actually download the program. Pretty soon it seemed everyone had heard the news. SCAD was offering a free download of Adobe CS6 for all current students, as well as incoming freshmen and transfer students.

Photography major Jessicla Clickner is one such student. “I was ecstatic when I got the email about the CS6 download.” She says, “I had almost paid the $250 student rate to get Photoshop alone.”

It’s not just about saving money of course. The opportunity to use CS6 should help students be better prepared for schoolwork, and hopefully make things easier for them as well.

As with most new things, there were a few hiccups. Freshmen had to wait until the start of the new school year to receive their download code, which caused some confusion among the newest students. There was also the unfortunate reality of slowdowns and downed websites.

Of course, that was all to be expected, after all, with so many students vying for the same link, it would have been naive to think there would be no bumps. Thankfully for everyone involved, things settled down, and students began to download CS6 in earnest, just in time for a fresh new quarter.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to download your free copy, yo should. It’s an easy process, made even easier by the fact that at this point in the quarter, you’ll have beaten the initial rush of students. Various SCAD-affiliated social media pages have already shared the steps to take in order to download the software, but because sharing is caring, you can also find them in this article:

To request your free copy of CS6, just log into MySCAD, hit up the Resources tab and click on SCAD Deals. If all goes well, you should be designing like a pro in no time flat.

Asked about what she thought of SCAD’s decision to offer this download, Clckner had this to add, “To get the free CS6 software was not something I was expecting, and this school continues to surprise me.”

With surprises like this one, it seems like everyone wins.

 

Thinking Outside the Bookstore

August 14, 2012 in From Student to Student, News, Student Life | No comments

Thinking outside the box is something art students do well, so in that spirit today we’re going to talk about alternatives for getting your textbooks.

Renting Digital Textbooks
Amazon, Coursesmart, Barnes and Noble, and other sites have made a number of textbooks available in a digital format. Aside from flat-out selling books digitally, they provide another option which allows you to rent an e-book version of their available textbooks. The way this works is, you purchase and download the textbook to your preferred e-reader. This download comes with a unique DRM that expires after a certain amount of days. Upon expiring, the e-book is deleted from the reader (similar to how you’d rent movies through Amazon Instant Video or iTunes). If you look, you can find many services that provide a similar feature like Google Play or even your local library (many of which have started using this type of service to lend books).

Now, this is all fine and dandy for those who like or can stand digital books, but what about those that still prefer printed material?

Renting Old-School Textbooks
Many services lend out physical books with a time limit on how long you can have it, similar to borrowing from a library. The only main difference is the rental fee and that the book is shipped to you and when you’re finished you have to ship it back to the company. So basically, it’s like a mail-order library. The good thing is you get pre-paid postage so shipping the book back doesn’t cost anything.

Many of these service also offer their books through a couple of rental plans. These plans tell you how long you can keep a book for example 60, 90, or 125+ days. Since SCAD runs on a trimester (a.k.a quarter) schedule, being able to rent a book for fewer days is an advantage. Storefronts like textbookrentals.com allow you to compare and contrast a wide array of online rental services’ prices and options.

Among the many sites out there that provide physical book rentals are Ebay’s Half.com, Barnes & Nobles, also Amazon. In addition to these main online retailers, some lesser-known  sites are Book Renter or even online used book sites like Abe Books.

The point being, there are plenty of alternatives for acquiring your text books if you just look hard enough. Honestly though, I’ve found more success in buying them cheaper used, sometimes the rental program end up more expensive. Just remember to thoroughly look at all your options before you buy. Also, make sure to take into account the time from when you purchase the book to the time your classes begin. There’s nothing as bad as getting your text book a week late due to slow shipping.

Breaking free of crash dieting (and finding unity within SCAD eLearning)

August 1, 2012 in From Student to Student, Student Life | No comments

by Paul Raymond Maynard, Advertising B.A., Vietnam

Paul is new to SCAD eLearning for summer quarter and an exciting addition to the Myriad staff. Welcome Paul!

coffee

Photo by Claire Eskers, BFA Photography

crash diet

noun
a weight-loss diet undertaken on an urgent, short-term basis with the aim of achieving very rapid results. http://oxforddictionaries.com

 

I felt terrible yesterday. My latest crash diet consisted of cutting out two of my life long daily staples: a yogurt cup and milk. I can go up to a month on some crazy health kick scheme… cutting out all meat, only living on tofu or dry cereal, excessive carb-loading, over doing it on the vitamin supplements …you get my point.

Luckily, this last occurrence of crash dieting only lasted about two weeks. Unfortunately, without some much needed soul searching, it probably won’t be the last.

Every day, I think about how lucky I was to be raised by my mom who cushioned herself on the Florida beaches and put me into so many sports activities that I know all the rules of all the games. She was raising me in the 1980’s, during the mass marketed health food crazes, self help book fads, not to mention L Ron Hubbard’s nationally favored “Dianetics” (which pretty much tells you how to live your life as a better person).

Is that all this crash dieting crazy stuff really is? A way to be a better me?

According to Oxford Dictionary, crash dieting is a way to get fast results. For what? I’m not overweight, I exercise…so what is it all about?

I decided to talk to my mom last summer and confess my addiction to crash dieting in an impromptu family meeting. This was step one in the right direction: communication. I learned my mom and my brother had also been affected by this addiction. I would have never known had I not been open with them. Now, I finally knew two people who were going through what I was. These two people, surprisingly, were my best friends. These two people were my mom and my brother.

Yesterday, when I got home, and before looking into the mirror, I closed my eyes, breathed in a new peace of mind, exhaled total exhaustion, and opened my eyes to see a tired and old image of myself staring back at me.

How long has this crash dieting been going on in my life? Since I was eight, doing family 5k races every weekend, drinking diet pop, and eating sugar free yogurt for lunch at school? Or was it when I was 12 and I saw my mom scarf down boxes of dry cereal in the car on the way to school (“…because there’s no fat in there..”- I remember she’d said why she’d liked eating it so much)?

Who knows when it all had started, but I ‘m a lot older and hopefully wiser now. I need to start listening to my body regarding choices when I eat.

This had been step 2: identifying the root of the problem, and not placing blame by taking control of one’s own life!

For goodness sake, Iced sugary milk coffee is a staple of Vietnam, the country I am experiencing now! It’s the most popular local past time: sitting in coffee shops for hours watching the chiseled ice melt in your high ball glass of rich, organic, chemical-free, locally home grown coffee drizzling over 2 tablespoons full of non-refined, sugary sweet, frosting-like, condensed milk.

Why am I trying to cut milk out of my diet? It sounds so delicious even as I write about it. Between handling the stress of a new culture and starting back to school at SCAD, I was overlooking step 3, which is the key to success: health.

I had luckily snapped out of my latest crash diet craze last night, went to the store and bought some fresh vegetables, ground coffee, sugar- free milk, and my daily love: yogurt. I felt fine. No, actually, excellent!

When successfully balancing my diet that way two weeks earlier, and as I am back to myself again today, I feel a great improvement in my life!

I said to myself, “Look at all things you’ve done in the past few months: completed the SCAD admissions process and was accepted, gotten finances in order, and prepared to officially start classes tomorrow!

I think step 4 is to accept that life is already pretty darn good!

As an eLearning student, one might feel left out or even lonely. Utilizing resources like reading the blogs on Myriad, writing your own Introductions and Reflections blogs in each of your classes, and even chatting on Blackboard IM can make us all feel a whole lot better about the unique superstars we really are!