And it begins, again

I’m back at school. When I was accepted I promised myself that once school actually started I’d be very diligent with blogging about my thoughts and work, and doing so at least once a week. We’re now headed into week 5 and I’m finally jumping in - a jump heavily influenced by the fact that if I don’t, I’ll owe someone a drink tomorrow.

I’ve just started work on my masters, an MFA of Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts. So far the program is really inspiring. I’ve joined with 13 other first years and about 14 second years in a fantastic (if not entirely finished) studio space, in the Flat Iron district of Manhattan.

The transition into school going from cubicle sitting has been interesting. For one, my entire schedule has had to shift and extend. Most of our classes are from 6-9 in the evening, which means that lunch is now somewhere around 2 or 3 and dinner maybe happens at 10. I tried to anticipate a lot about the course in the months leading up September, but I had never imagined how weird it would be to shift all of your meals by 3 hours.

In the first 4 weeks of school we’ve already done quite a lot. We started out with a workshop run by Frank Chimero on the topic of Noticing. It was a great way to ease back in to thinking critically and conceptually again, and also provided a very good reason to spend time at Doughnut Plant and the Natural History Museum. Tom, my classmate (who will owe me a drink tomorrow if his blog doesn’t spring to life tonight), wrote a great post about it on the department’s blog.

In future, maybe even this week, I hope to write a bit about why I decided to go back to school and what I hope to gain from it. For now though, I think this is a pretty decent shout out into the void.