Fight the Stereotype
“You’re never going to get a job with that”
“Oh, so you don’t want to make money then?”
“What’s your career goal, a starving artist?”
Questions I have heard more times than once since deciding on my major in 2014 (holy cow, 5 years ago now!!!). I will probably never stop hearing these questions until my career really starts and I prove to people I can make money with it. The stereotype of an art student being poor and never getting a job has been around for a long time. It’s often discouraging and makes students not want to explore the major. Fortunately it helps the students who have the courage to take the risk and study art. Employers like the idea of us having something different on a resume. We aren’t just another business major looking to get into advertising. We have the creative mind set to make things that people like, and we can show that on our resume’s and at a job interview. We spend our time in college building our portfolio’s to show to our future employers that we are different from other college students. This sets us apart from the rest of the college graduates because we had the courage to go into a field that not many others do.
“School must be so easy for you!”
“I wish I could just color for my major!”
We aren’t like other students. We don’t sit around and write papers and study out of textbooks. We work in art studios and create until we can’t create anymore. To other students this means we do nothing except pick up crayons and markers and draw. While, yes, we do create for most of our classes, it is not that easy. Professors are not easy on us. We can’t get away with turning in just anything. We work for weeks a time on one project, and often times it can get frustrating. A professor wants to see you do your best, but that means they will often criticize your art and tell you to change things that you thought were good about it. Other students don’t see us in the library until 3AM because we are in the art studios pulling all nighters and chugging coffee over a paint pallet instead of a computer keyboard.