Graduate school part 3

So, you have made the decision to attend grad school for art. You have three interviews set up. What should you ask about? Funding is always a good one. How is the school going to invest in you as a student? Being in graduate school is already hard enough with the work load being double what your senior year was. Having to figure out how to pay for it opens up another whole dilema. If an institution tells you that you can apply for financial aid, this should be the first time that the school is set to support you as a graduate student. private funding through scholarship money is important in your success as a graduate student. If the institution has none or very little then thank them and be your way. Living quarters that are appropriate for advanced students should be available. If you have to go and find housing in the community then take this into consideration when it comes to negotiating your graduate school attendance. Real world experience in the school or through the school is very important. If you have no opportunity to build real world experience, again, say thank you and move on. A place that you just make art and take a couple of classes is not an adequate learning enviornment. After all an MFA is a professional degree and the program should be treating it as such.

The last part of this whole endeavor is this, when you go to college you are paying to be part of a group of people, hopefully professionals. Given this, the alumni association is extremely important for you to network through when you get out of school. These are people who share your educational experience and hopefully are building upon this in the real world. Ask how active their alumni association is. Ask how many alumni stay in the area or relocate to the nearest big city. Ask who are some of the most sucessful alumni so you can get an idea of how solid the education you are about to pay for really is. Also, check out the alumni association on your own. Sometimes professors are not glued in to the institution's own performance in this area, so be a student and do your homework.

A final note on graduate school, like many things in life, this is a negotiation. They have something you want, the ability to legitimize what you do on your own. You have something they want, money and dedication to the pursuit of being an artist. The reason I am telling you this is because most people think of college in this way, you apply, you pay, you work hard, you get your degree and you go out into the world. But graduate school is much different. Especially for fine art. You apply to many places. You get interviews at a couple. Everywhere is going to ask you where else you applied to and if you have interviews there. They do this to gauge their competition for your attendance to their program. This plays out in your favor if you play things right. A fellow graduate school attendie of mine had interviews at Yale and Boston MFA. When he came to the institution we attended, he used their wanting him as leverage to gain larger scholarship money. He won that bet and got double what everyone else got. Part of the situation is that graduate programs select students which will make their programs more attractive to new graduate students in the coming years. They want you because you lend a degree a newness to the institution no matter how good the faculty are. Yale being a prime example of this. Don't be a jerk in your negotiation but know that you do have this ability if you so choose to use it.

Good luck in gradschool and I hope this helps give some food for thought.