So, Austin, how do you like school? Well, I'll tell ye...

It's school. Nothing profound here.

If you're still reading, school is good but already hard. I'm closing out just my second week of this semester, let me tell you what I think:

Graphic Design 1 is a lot of fun, I think the teacher of this class is shaping up to be my favorite teacher this semester. He's adjunct faculty and cares more about us learning and experimenting so far than meeting some arbitrary goal of thumbnails. He is either under the impression that it's a branding class, but I guess I gotta learn branding sometime. All we've done so far is design or redesign company logos, which is neat. Not what I want to do, but neat.

History of Design and Visual Art is fun but a surprising amount of work. We've already had a field trip to the Crandall Printing Museum, written a 3 page research paper on a designer/printer/typographer of the teacher's choice (I got William Blake) and had a quiz. In some ways it's good but I prefer art history classes when the teacher lectures and we have 3 tests and maybe one paper like all my other classes, instead of 3 research papers, 4 assignments, 5 texts, and 6 calling birds, but oh well. It better improve my knowledge of type history I guess.

Digital Painting is cool and I have a bunch of friends in the class though I'm not sure I'm going to do well due to the teacher's teaching methods, or lack thereof. He seems to be more concerned with our artistic and conceptual sensibilities, not our mastery or proficiency with painting using photoshop. He has flat out stated he's not planning on teaching us any technique or use of the program which is really frustrating, as I thought that was why I was paying him. Oh well. One semester, and you can't love every teacher.

I'm also in my last semester of art lectures, once a week and an hour and a half every Thursday, shouldn't be too painful though I've never heard of any of the presenters except one, and I've only heard of him because I took a class from him.

To get the extra credit I need to qualify for my grant I'm taking another 1 credit class, Saturday Weight Lifting. Yoga was all full and all the other classes required too much cardio/leg mobility. I've only been once but it's just like you'd expect it. Lift weights for half an hour and chart your progress.

Finally and most awesomely I've started an internship at McNeil Printing, the family (in-law) business. I've been shadowing their Graphic Designer as well as being given little projects to work on. So far I designed a sticker for BYU's Athletic Department and a company's mission statement plaque. It's more fun than all my classes combined but it's unpaid and I'm only going @ 5 hours a week, but I've learned more there in going 3 times than most of my other classes in their entirety. So there's that.

That's my semester in a nutshell, I finally am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, hoping it's not a train, and am gonna do my best to get all A's like last semester.

Thanks for reading