Starting this blog as a way to document my University experience as a computer graphics student in Sweden sounded like a great idea, but five months passed and I haven’t written a single post! So, that gives me the first fact about this course:

1. It’s tough

The course is packed with countless assignments that have weekly deadlines. My plan was to write about some of them, since they were pretty interesting, but I had no time or energy by the end of the week to do anything but sleep. Many of them I would just barely manage to finish by Sunday evening despite working every day since Monday. Just the fact that class started with 30 accepted students and now is at around 18, shows how overwhelming this course can be.

2. People give up

As I already mentioned, many people dropped out, and let me tell you I faced moments of despair few times too! The only thing that kept me going was the support of my husband. Despite feeling like the stupidest person at times, he managed to convince me that I was actually doing just fine.

3. It breaks you and makes you

The program often felt designed to break you down, testing your commitment and resilleance, putting you in a crunch simulating real world environment in the studios (I guess). Mental and physical exhaustion became the norm and as one of my classmates pointed out, it often felt like we are in a “Squid Game”. BUT, let’s not be gore. At the end this program managed to create something amazing – atmosphere of supportive classmates, and personally made me a more confident person who managed to accomplish so many things – things I never thought I was capable of making, showing me just how much can be accomplished in a short period of time.
When winter break rolled in, I could reflect on last two semesters and be proud of myself for all the things I made in these short 3,5 months. I would’ve never been able to do all that on my own, studying by myself.

4. It’s not all perfect

Even though this program builds confidence and makes you proud, there’s still room for improvement. Many unclear instructions as to what is expected to be done for certain assignments and what is the actual purpose of assignments sometimes, makes you feel lost and frustrated. There is this feeling of experimental approach as like they are still trying to figure out the best way to teach this program. The changing nature of the curriculum doesn’t feel great for us currently being here, but this suggests that in a few years program will be so polished and improved that it might be (nearly) perfect.

Conclusion:

As I said, it is tough but also very rewarding journey. Despite the challenges, I wouldn’t like to discourage anyone from enrolling here, since I think this might be the best decision I have made in my life – to start studying here in my really late 20s. There’s so much to learn, but I am still pushing through and have no intent of giving up (until next break down), and hopefully at the end of the year, once again I’ll look back and be proud of myself for all the things I have accomplished.

Now that I feel like I have a bit more time, I would like to go back to some of the projects I did in the last few months and write about them here. Until then, have a nice week and I will dive back into learning to model in Maya. 😥