Assignment

Hello all! I’m Ravyn, 23 year old, second-year graduate student at ITP. I’m from Texas and really close to my family. I have three older brothers and two younger sisters. I love a lot of things: Beyoncé, Kanye, books, music, television shows, art, technology, design, and cooking to name a few. I am interested in studying topics related to race and gender.

Before ITP, I studied Strategic Communication and Studio Art in undergrad at TCU, a small, private, liberal arts college in Fort Worth, Texas. During my college career I interned/worked for a few non-profits. I worked all through college (and again through grad school lol) and I feel I learned just as much outside the classroom in my internships. I also had the chance to study abroad my junior year of college and feel I learned the most during that time.

What is the value of pursuing A Higher Education? / Why attend ITP? What to learn?

Messy answer:

I see the ability to pursue higher education being a privilege that not a lot of people have access to. It is something that is expected, maybe even ingrained into people at a young age. I think it’s valuable in that it allows you to experience new ways of doing something, thinking, learning and people. However, I think it always comes down to accessibility. If you really wanted to learn something you could do so by teaching yourself but you would have to have access to such tools to teach yourself. And even in doing so, I think there are things you miss out on.

For me, a masters degree was expected. Before I even graduated undergrad, family members and friends were asking me about grad school. I felt the pressure to attend grad school, but even without the pressure from others I knew a masters degree was in my path. I’m lucky that I found a program that caters to my interests and forces me to excel and fail. ITP still scares but I think the fear is also motivational, it drives me to keep going.

In terms of what I hope to learn, idk, I can only think broadly, as ITP has proved to be a mecca of discovery. Discovering things I’ve never heard of. It’s a foreign environment that I’m still adjusting to.

I think a higher education degree is necessary to make a comfortable living. I think its possible to go through life without pursuing a higher education. But I believe a higher education degree leads to reaching a certain status or having more opportunities. It’s a door opener.

While I do believe that there are ways to learn outside the classroom: internships, apprenticeships, online courses, traveling, etc., I think attending school gives one access to tools, networks, and opportunities.

Generally, 10 years of employed experience equates to a degree. For those in my family that didn’t complete higher education, the alternative was intensive self-development to compensate for the loss of certification. This includes freelancing, community mentorship, topical trial-and-error, independent research, etc.

My name is Esther Hersh and I am from Brooklyn, New York. I studied Fine Arts in a liberal arts college and then worked in art consulting before attending ITP.  I only decided to go to graduate school when I experienced the limitations of entering the workforce without a graduate degree. A liberal arts education does not provide you with a solid foundation in one specific field and that seemed to be what employers were really looking for. I was working in a field in which there were unpaid internships posted all the time for which a graduate degree was “preferred.” Higher education (at least in this country) seems very practical. In some fields you need it, either because of the skills you need to develop or because the people in your field value those who have pursued higher education. I’m not sure that it should be expected of people the way it is, especially considering the cost of higher education. I think people are inherently aware of how they learn and for some that’s in a classroom. I enjoy being a student and was happy to continue as a student for a while since I learn best and produce more work within that structure but I don’t expect that would be the case for everyone nor do I think that I should be more valued as a potential employee because I learn best this way and because graduate school was financially feasible for me.

While it’s possible that learning in traditional school might be the best option for most people (although I’m not suggesting that this is the necessarily the case,) I think that if graduate school is an absolute necessity after 12 years of school and 4 years of college that our education system has fundamentally failed in some way. It’s possible that a system more like England’s would help students since they can focus more on their personal interests while in high school, experience college level courses (or an actual college) in sixth form and then focus in on their careers in college. I do believe that a liberal arts education is an end onto itself and should not be sacrificed, but neither should a person’s ability to support themselves without mountains of debt or a piece of paper that assures others that they’ve studied within one very specific structure.

Alternative learning experiences can range from independent study using online resources which many use to learn coding and design, apprenticeships which have taught young workers for centuries, and internship programs which can vary in structure. When internships are viewed as an opportunity to teach, and inspire the next generation within any field, instead a way to hire cheap or free labor, students learn about a career within it’s environment. They can be offered supplementary classes and workshops but they spend every day in the environment where they will eventually be employed. They can learn more about life in the field that way instead of being blindsided when they leave college, learn by doing, and hopefully make money in the process.

• Why did you choose to attend Graduate School?

• Do you think a Higher Education is necessary today or in the future?

• Now that you have stated some reasons why you are pursuing a degree at a traditional school, investigate and write about other ways to obtain this knowledge in alternative learning experiences.

I decided to attend ITP because I wanted to break some barriers, to get to know more people that are focused and creative, and to learn from this environment of diversity and collaboration. I wanted to pursue a master’s degree for a time, however my undergraduate studies in EE left me kind of bored, and then when I started to study Choreography I really liked it and learned a lot while I was there, but I didn’t like much the way the group behaved or thought towards its own education. The teaching system was also generally old and it wouldn’t let me explore within the school the ideas that it helped me to generate. I was working in my company for a while with my partner, and then we started to encounter some barriers in the dance world that had to do with us being young and from a different background than the arts or dance one. It was very difficult for us to find good collaborators. We could and we worked very well with the ones that we found, but because of time constraints or other responsibilities, it was not so easy to continue working with them besides of the specific projects.

I wanted to expand my horizons, but I knew they had nothing to do with technical knowledge. There are a lot of materials where it is possible to get information, and for me, most of the time it was better to use them than to get the information through an exposition-based class. When I found about ITP I really liked the idea of diversity, collaboration, and open-mindedness; of breaking barriers and prejudices of what can or can’t be done. 

Another impact factor to consider is that I’m here because of the [financial] support given by NYU Tisch and a pair of Mexican organizations, CONACYT and Fundación INBA. Without that, the tuition costs would be practically impossible to cover with my income as a teacher and as a freelance with my company, and many years of savings would have been needed because of the currency conversion rate between the Mexican Peso and the US Dollar. Would I save my money during many years in order to get a master’s degree? I don’t think so. But now that I have this opportunity, I want to make the most out of it.

I get overwhelmed by the question of the importance of Higher Education. It has to do with what is its purpose, and the purpose of life. Does it all revolves around money? I liked the text about the liberal arts degree, because I think that there are (should be?) higher reasons to do things. I believe in human potential, and I think that activities such as arts, sports and basic science have an important role in our humanity. Would it be better to cut all the budget of those activities to eradicate poverty and food scarcity? I’m not really sure, because what would be the purpose of saving us all if there were no more of these things to do and to get inspired from? However, do all these things actually mean something of value to all the people without higher education?

I liked the following excerpts from In Defense of Liberal Arts:

If your liberal arts degree doesn’t prove to be the golden ticket to white-collar employment, the dirty secret is that neither do many people’s degrees in business or engineering.

But as someone who went through the program with a few deep reservations—which included my leaving for a year and then coming back—there is, I think, no other place where these higher goals can be pursued so openly and so easily. And if there are two different, mutually exclusive ends to education—freedom and job-preparation—it is good that there is (or was) at least one institution in the world that made that choice so clear.

Subjects such as philosophy, classical literature, and mathematics should be studied because they are themselves goods that the student should aspire to understand and make his own. They are—to put it strongly—among the good we live life for. Like Socrates, who was poor and shabby, the student of the liberal arts may never make much of himself. But for Socrates—and for his students—that was never the goal.

Though Socrates did defend himself, it was to people who did not understand what he was saying.

About alternative learning experiences (and probably with traditional ones too), I think the most important part has to do with motivation. Why would we want to learn more? Are “money”, “productivity”, “fear of being replaced by a machine”, “the need of sustaining a family”, convincingly enough reasons? Isn’t the curiosity and willingness to learn part of what makes us human? How do we “lose” those characteristics?

The system we live in is after all created and reinforced by all of us. Entrepreneurship may allow us to change the rules by asking if we really need to replicate the known models. What are the things that we require of employees? Do we need a resume and an interview? What kind of interview? During the last couple of years I have been very moved by the notion of Google not caring about hiring top college graduates…

I apologize for the loose structure of this text: a lot of questions have been arising and I don’t know yet how to organize them or how to start answering them…

I came to ITP to give myself time and space to focus on my studies. Before ITP I was working at a database company on their education team. Part of the company’s goals is for their employees to have a ‘transformational career experience’. People are encourage to set personal improvement goals, attend classes, and expand their skills. This happens though in person classes at places like General Assembly, online courses with Coursera, Udacity, or straight from a university. This is how I realized that I was interested in pursuing design and technology. Even though we had work time for self improvement and the resources to do it, I felt that in order to make the leap into design I needed to make it the focus of my time.