Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved art. I’ve been drawing and painting forever. Once I started at UT Dallas, I found that I had electives and began exploring the possibilities of continuing to engage in art while studying computer science.
I love computer science. That’s my major. And I enjoy what I’m doing for my main coursework, but also I found myself missing a lot of that creative component. Because coding engages the very analytical problem-solving part of your brain. I found that I enjoy excelling in the artistic aspects just as much. Art allows you to let your instincts take over, and I seek to engage that creative itch every year during my time at UTD.
When you have a bunch of computer science classes, you don’t have the time for a hobby at home. What I started doing since my first semester of college was taking at least one art course wherever I could fit it in. I’ve taken drawing foundations, a visual design course, and the Pop-Up Locker reading course.
Honors students must take a certain number of honors classes before we graduate. Students use those for their core courses, like rhetoric, government, and economics. But I had a lot of those done in high school. Instead, I focused on subjects that I found interesting, like the internet and public policy, or video games and social justice. They’re always really enjoyable. And this last semester, I finally took an art-related one.
While reading the catalog, I noticed the one on the Pop-Up Locker exhibition design, and it stood out to me. I saw the word design, and I love art, so I signed up. And honestly, looking back, it’s so much more than I could have ever expected, and everyone in my class always says the same thing. We didn’t know what we were getting into, but we’re so happy that we got so much more out of it than I’ve ever gotten out of any other reading course I’ve ever taken.
Initially, we read a novel to pick out our theme and then moved on to creating our own exhibitions. The professors, xtine burrough and Dale MacDonald, required that each student make one. Then, we also acted as judges for the other presentations and even voted for the winners out of the people who participated outside our class. Now we’re making the catalogs by hand, which has also been super fun.
The type of experience that creative hobbies can give you, a lot of people need to realize how useful they are. I was working on a computer science project under the Association for Computing Machinery this semester. Our team was developing an app. And besides contributing to the computer science portions, I created a really cool logo and animated it because I have experience in these areas. That set our team apart from the other groups because we had these little tiny things here and there, like custom illustrations, as opposed to free online graphics. I was able to sit down and take care of that myself and was later tasked with overseeing the aesthetic things.
It’s like a different type of patience that you get from working on art that you don’t get in other subjects. It’s made me so much more open-minded and helped me develop a type of thinking where I have to push myself to think outside of the box. Sometimes you have to take risks with your art, just like you have to take risks with other things. Being engaged in art has just helped me in so many ways.