4/28 & 5/3: Final projects were presented, and I’m incredibly happy with how mine turned out.
Through this class, I learned that sometimes, it’s OK to push yourself so far beyond where your comfort zone ends because that’s where all of the best learning happens. The realization came when I was face-to-face with Starry Night at MoMA, knowing that I was supposed to be reflecting on what I was seeing but all I could do was stand in awe and recognize how little justice the prints I’d grown up around did to this art. I stood in the Bestiary Garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, writing about the Gothic Revival architecture and knowing absolutely nothing about what that meant. It was listening to Dr. Eric discuss HIV in homosexual adolescents and empathizing so much more than I ever thought I could.
While working on this project I learned that I was allowed to use grids and text in a way that wasn’t necessarily scientific if I could find a way to be creative about it. STEM classes are always very much centered around “this is the right answer, anything else is only slightly correct”. This project completely subverted that, forcing me not to be as literal as I would be in any other class this semester.
