WAYUT: Creative graduate programs are a haven in a neo-pandemic world
With no guarantee of success, why am I doing this?
I’m a second-year Screenwriting MFA student which, to many people, is a very silly sentence. I chose to pay money for elective school which does not assure any success in the film industry. In fact, the more I seek out to demystify the film and television business, the more I am assured that I have literally no idea what I’m doing.
So why do it? Why go to graduate school for a creative pursuit at all?
The answer, for me, lies in living in a neo-pandemic world.
When I was a week away from turning 23, I moved to New York. I’d gotten a gig as a podcast intern at a PR company and had lofty visions of working my way to being the company’s in-house creative producer.
72 days later, the pandemic hit.
I was promoted (yay!) to a full-time position working exclusively in PR (sure?) and quickly learned that the company that preached ethical practices and a compassionate approach to work-life balance was in fact a festering pool of neo-liberal egomaniacs and a racist HR lady (oh.).
Like most people, working 14-hour days from home at a job where I got yelled at if a bullet point was the wrong color in an email (true story) swiftly lost its glamor.
I don’t even know what PR is! What the hell is circling back! I will literally beat you up!
My world, like everyone else’s, became small and isolating and bleak. I felt removed from community and, by extension, art. I felt my residual undergraduate passion dim, and I hated it.
So I left that job. I applied to and got into my current grad program. And now here we are.
For those interested in pursuing a career in the arts, graduate school can seem like a waste of time and money. And, if you’re not really absolutely positively certain that this is the path you want to follow, then it is those things.
For me, however, grad school has meant so much more to me than receiving an education (though that is, like, a huge part of it). It has provided me with an environment which is baked in community, and an art-driven community at that.
Two years of our lives went by in which isolation was a given. A screen was placed over the world—both literally and figuratively—that removed the inherent art of community, and loneliness carved its way into our bones. Joining my current program has brought me out of that dormant and desolate feeling. It placed me in a world of true compassion and a natural curiosity for making beautiful and meaningful things.
I am reminded of John Keating’s line in Dead Poets Society:
The human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
Going to school for a creative pursuit feels like I am saying yes to that quote. Yes, yes I agree, and I am so glad to be alive.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s that grad school, this program, has been a vessel through which I have found my livelihood again. A light that I have stepped into, where I have found so many others blinking its luminance, after years alone and in the dark.
Don’t get me wrong, creative graduate programs come with their own issues, especially film programs. If you are anything other than a white, straight, cis man, you will face prejudice in some form or another and it will suck and feel for a moment like your art isn’t worth making or you aren’t talented enough or you’re dumb for even trying.
And then you’ll shake it off. And you’ll keep going.
Making art will always feel a little silly and a little selfish. It is inherently both of those things.
But there is something lovely about being surrounded by a group of people whose love for humanity rattles their bones, echoes through the hollow parts of their body, and who so deeply want to reflect that aching feeling back to the world in a way that says, “I made this for you and it is part of me. I want you to have it.”
You just don’t get that type of shit from going to business school.
I thought a lot about how to approach this topic before writing it. When answering the question “Are creative graduate programs worth it?” there are many routes I could take. I could dole out statistics, or remark upon topics like networking and cost. (Both important, by the way.)
But the truth is, creative graduate programs will only ever be worth it to you if you feel that art—the making of it and the appreciation of it—is worth it. And I do.
I really do.
