Hello There,
While in Grad School, i really enjoyed some of the journaling aspects we were asked to do. The journals were centered around our experiences during our work and personal life. I think reflection is one of the most important thing to do in student affairs in order to create connections with others (both in the field and outside of it) and to receive advice about how to move forward in practices, procedures. To go one step further, I plan to incorporate music into my blog posts and I will try to update this blog twice a month.
I guess I should start from the beginning to explain who I am. My name is DJ Escobar, i grew up in the East Bay of California, aka the SF bay area, but really closer to Oakland. High school sucked, but what else is new, so i will choose to skip over that and start with my undergraduate education. I think that this is important to note because i feel like my experience in high school had no real impact of who I am today/
I completed my undergrad work in Monterey California at California State University, Monterey Bay. I spent five years there, first as a Marine Biology major. but after realizing how much i hate math, moved to an art degree path.
To be honest (tbh) I never loved art, i will never forget my godmother (who was my kindergarten teacher) came up to me before my wedding and told me that she would have never thought that i would have ended up as a art major, because of two reasons; 1) I could never color in the lines, and 2) both my godmother and my mom would use art as a way to punish me when i was little. I loved photography in highschool, and right before my grandpa died my grandma gave me all of his old photography stuff. Nothing too special, just a couple of old black and white film Minoltas. I loved being behind the camera, and my photography teacher, shout out to Mr. Baughman, was weird and eccentric, and that's exactly what I saw my future, as a high school photography teacher.
Well, that was short lived. My college photography professor, and most of the art professors in general, were not that supportive in my art. While I believe critiquing helps you become better at any job, I think there is a fine line between critique and degradation. I will never forget that one day during work on my capstone, my photography teacher was teaching about a digital composite project that all digital photography students did. She was showing examples about which ones worked well and which ones didn't. I had taken the class the semester before and the slideshow she was showing was all pretty much the same, most of the examples were from students who had already graduated. Then she showed mine, in which she quickly skipped over. Her and I never clicked, I don't know if it was because I did shop primarily at thrift stores, didn't spend hours of extra time in the studio, or if she truly didn't like me at all, but all of my critiques from her were negative, never encouraging anything I did and only told me how i was a bad artist. I felt like all of this was trivial because art is subjective, which is what they would teach us, but then go around and tell me that my art was "bad," was contradictory.
While this experience made my undergrad experience difficult, it led me to become more involved in Housing and Residence Life and my Resident Advisor (RA) position. Which i will talk about next blog...
This post's song is Summertime Gladness by Dance Gavin Dance. I have been into this band since high school. This band sounds completely different and have transformed immensely over a short time. This aligns very much with my experiences in undergrad and so I thought that this would be a good first band to include in my blog post.
While in Grad School, i really enjoyed some of the journaling aspects we were asked to do. The journals were centered around our experiences during our work and personal life. I think reflection is one of the most important thing to do in student affairs in order to create connections with others (both in the field and outside of it) and to receive advice about how to move forward in practices, procedures. To go one step further, I plan to incorporate music into my blog posts and I will try to update this blog twice a month.
I guess I should start from the beginning to explain who I am. My name is DJ Escobar, i grew up in the East Bay of California, aka the SF bay area, but really closer to Oakland. High school sucked, but what else is new, so i will choose to skip over that and start with my undergraduate education. I think that this is important to note because i feel like my experience in high school had no real impact of who I am today/
I completed my undergrad work in Monterey California at California State University, Monterey Bay. I spent five years there, first as a Marine Biology major. but after realizing how much i hate math, moved to an art degree path.
To be honest (tbh) I never loved art, i will never forget my godmother (who was my kindergarten teacher) came up to me before my wedding and told me that she would have never thought that i would have ended up as a art major, because of two reasons; 1) I could never color in the lines, and 2) both my godmother and my mom would use art as a way to punish me when i was little. I loved photography in highschool, and right before my grandpa died my grandma gave me all of his old photography stuff. Nothing too special, just a couple of old black and white film Minoltas. I loved being behind the camera, and my photography teacher, shout out to Mr. Baughman, was weird and eccentric, and that's exactly what I saw my future, as a high school photography teacher.
Well, that was short lived. My college photography professor, and most of the art professors in general, were not that supportive in my art. While I believe critiquing helps you become better at any job, I think there is a fine line between critique and degradation. I will never forget that one day during work on my capstone, my photography teacher was teaching about a digital composite project that all digital photography students did. She was showing examples about which ones worked well and which ones didn't. I had taken the class the semester before and the slideshow she was showing was all pretty much the same, most of the examples were from students who had already graduated. Then she showed mine, in which she quickly skipped over. Her and I never clicked, I don't know if it was because I did shop primarily at thrift stores, didn't spend hours of extra time in the studio, or if she truly didn't like me at all, but all of my critiques from her were negative, never encouraging anything I did and only told me how i was a bad artist. I felt like all of this was trivial because art is subjective, which is what they would teach us, but then go around and tell me that my art was "bad," was contradictory.
While this experience made my undergrad experience difficult, it led me to become more involved in Housing and Residence Life and my Resident Advisor (RA) position. Which i will talk about next blog...
This post's song is Summertime Gladness by Dance Gavin Dance. I have been into this band since high school. This band sounds completely different and have transformed immensely over a short time. This aligns very much with my experiences in undergrad and so I thought that this would be a good first band to include in my blog post.
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