18 October 2018.
After the CTS session today I went to my first personal tutorial with the head of IVM year 1, Maisie Noble.
We had 15 to 20 minutes to have a brief chat on how is everything going with the course, am I doing okay or is everything overwhelming me. She asked me whether I figured out the Moodle, my school email and my blog and I said yes. Then I tried to be honest and told her that I still felt like I didn’t entirely belong here and that I am not as good as the other students here in this course when it came to ability and technique. And I still had a lot of questions about the unit and their respective projects. I was having a hard time imagining the which project had to be done at what time, especially with the mini zine project and the side project. Besides these, I told her I was really enjoying the course. And despite the fact that I was still partially doubting the decision I’ve made, I was certain that this is as good as it can get in terms of a course selection.
She called my thought process the imposter syndrome and it is very common between art and design students when they see themselves like they don’t belong to where they are because they doubt themselves. Then she said “Everybody in here come from different backgrounds with different levels and set of skills. For this reason, we try to cater you all and start with the basics. Also, each person here has a different way of executing briefs and projects so no one’s way is entirely right or wrong. What you can do is to stop doubting yourself and accept failure as a part of the learning process”. I knew she was going to say this. I told her I had a slight issue with perfectionism and that I sometimes beat myself up when things don’t go my way. She said being in this course was basically going against that issue and that I could learn to reverse it here even though it’s hard. I agreed, I knew this was going to be a problem but I went ahead anyway so now I’m trying to do what she said to me.
Besides the general conversation, Maisie explained how the briefs are going to be executed and their relation to the units and finally everything made sense.
