F1lm Sch00l

I remember that every time I told someone my senior year that I was going to NYU Film School, they always asked me that one question: “Oh, what made you decide you wanted to go into film?” I’d come up with some random answer each time - but looking back, I’m realizing all of that was a load of BS I’d come up with after interning at NBC29 for a few months. How long had I been really interested in film for? 1 year? 2 years? All things considered, that’s a very short time for me.

I’ve been slowly realizing over the past two months or so that NYU Film School may not be for me. I love NYU and doubt I would transfer to a different school, but I’m having to seriously consider whether to stick with the film program or not. When I originally searched for film schools, everyone always said that NYU was the school for directors - I should have believed them. The classes I’m in and the classes I’ll be taking next year seem very interesting and helpful to whatever area of film you end up going in to - but they still seem to be classes directed at the 1% of us that go on to be famous directors. Learning how to direct is important even if you’re not going to be a director - but do all of us really need to spend the majority of our four years on it? I may not know exactly what I would want to do in film, but it’s not direct.

And to be quite honest, I don’t even know if film is where I want to be five years from now. Most of my peers are excited for the sophomore and junior level intensive production courses and can’t wait to get theirs hands on a camera; meanwhile, I’m dreading those courses and am looking forward to the iPhone development elective in Computer Science. My favorite class? Computer Science. My favorite time of the week? At the newspaper doing web development. Dream internship this summer? Working at the web desk of a newspaper.

In fact, if I look at the activities that I’ve been consistently interested in, here’s how they stack up:

• 1.5/2 years film
• 4 years theater production
• 8 years computer science
• [and then like 12 years of acting, but I'm not going there]

How much time and money do I want to spend pursuing something that I’m coming to realize is low on my list of priorities?

There are few things I love more than the Gmail spam filter. Not only does it allow me to simply forget about the existence of junk mail in most instances - it saves me the letdown and disappointment of going to check my mail and getting excited over a new message, only to discover that it’s just some PayPal scam. This way, when I see that I have a new message, I know it’s an actual message for me. Well that, or some ridiculous group invite on Facebook from someone I met once two years ago and will never speak to again.

It used to be the same way with physical mail. I would go and check the mail religiously after I got home from high school, sort through it as I walked back to the house, and would enter the front door either ecstatic with joy or crushed with disappointment over the joyous attention or dismal lack thereof the world had given me that. But either way - if I got a letter, it was good letter.

Jump forward to college, where New York University has managed to destroy both my electronic and physical mail standards. In order to get those one or two emails per semester you actually need, colleges make you sit through hundreds of pieces of email that apply to about half a percent of the student population. “Oh, there’s a meeting of Asian Republicans this afternoon at the student center? Good for them. Why the hell are you bothering me with this?” I get about 10 emails a day from my NYU email account. Not only are none of them interesting to me - 95% of them don’t even apply to me (messages directed at Seniors, for example. I would wager that, despite my AP credits, I am nevertheless not considered a Senior).

Same story with my physical mailbox - “Ooh! A piece a mail! Let’s go spend 30 seconds opening the lock. What’s this? A game? I’m supposed to find two other residents that got the same slip of paper in their mailboxes and then go enter a contest for a chance win an iPod Nano?” I’ve left out my explatives.

Why can’t they just leave me alone?

Out of all the pain and misery and suffering and hair-tearing and nail-biting and fist jabbing and wall-kicking and mindless-shouting and pure, unadulterated rage that has been a part of my life ever since I started spending hours and hours in the Tisch editing room, I think I’ve come up with something I’m actually kind of proud of.

We finished our experimental unit a while back, and I finally got around to uploading it - watch if you care, it’s just over 2 minutes.

Mosiac from Michael Strickland on Vimeo.

We decided in the class discussion that it was an externalization of my frustration with creativity, the two “characters” representing both my creative and critical halves.

In actuality, I just kind of thought mosaics were cool…

I feel ashamed for not writing an election post until now. But I think that’s because I’m only now recovered from election night. You see, I got to the Washington Square News at around noon on Tuesday - mostly just prep work, making sure our election blog feeds were working, getting our image rotation up and running…

The usual. I left the newsroom 20 hours later at 8 a.m.

I loved every minute of it, though. Everyone keeps suggesting that our grandkids will be asking us where we were when Obama was elected president - I think running the online election coverage will be a pretty good answer. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, honestly. After experiencing the slightly-less-intense 2007 elections as “That guy that enters the data at the bottom of the television screen” at NBC29, I’ve become slightly addicted to newsrooms during elections.

Besides, when else can a web designer use red white and blue geometric shapes so shamelessly? It’s sickening, almost - but so much fun.

I then had to answer a Gallup poll about my sleep habits on Wednesday. Let’s see: Work from midnight to 8:00, class until noon, sleep until 5, class until 10, locked out of my room ’til midnight… Ah well - they asked.

Another life checkpoint post.

I came to NYU knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Unlike most college students, who dabbled here and there and have some sort of vague idea of what they want their major to be (and don’t have to choose for two more years), I knew not only that I wanted to be a film major, but that I wanted to specialize in sound design and engineering.

Oh, how I miss that blissful state of certainty that I had two months ago.

My first quarter of college, more than anything else, has taught me that I really know shit about where I want my life to go. I don’t even know whether being a film major is the best choice for me. Sure, I’m doing well in my film classes - but to be honest, I’m both doing better in and enjoying my non-film classes much more. Would Computer Science have been a better route for me? Or web design - the dozens and dozens of hours I’ve spent doing web work for the NYU Newspaper have been incredibly fun and educational for me. Meanwhile, my film teachers go on and on about how expensive our Junior and Senior projects are to shoot; how we’ll never see the light of day once we enter our Junior-level production class; how intense the competition becomes.

Do I want this?

I keep telling myself that things will get better next year, once all of the introductory-level classes are done with. Then I can take the specialized classes that really interest me - Editing, South Mixing, Sound Design… But then again, by that point, it’ll be too late to switch out. If I get to second semester Sophomore year and decide Film isn’t what’s best for me, what do I do?

In reality, this deliemma is no more unique or problematic than the situation of any other college student in any other university. I think I’m just more worried than most, because I’ve seen how quickly a die-hard passion can fade away. Most students work off the idea that they’ll know what they want to be by the end of their four years. I’m working off the fear that I won’t know until it’s too late.

After putting up with long hours in the editing labs, a seemingly obsessive-demand by my professors to be creative 24-7, and constant reminders about how much other NYU students hate Film Majors, I think I’ve finally experienced a moment where I’m glad to be a Film kid at NYU. The reason?

My midterms are probably the easiest tests I’ve taken in years.

While my friends studying in the College of Arts and Sciences are nervously wandering the halls before their exams, studying pages of Biology notes and trying to memorize derivatives (what I like to call high school on crack; seriously, their building looks exactly like a high school), I go into my tests realizing that - aside from maybe a page of vocabuarly terms - if I know what I’m doing technically, I won’t have a problem with the exam. The ones I’ve had so far are 80% problem solving, 20% vocabulary you know off the top of your head if you’ve been paying attention in class. And even for the film students that are having difficulty with some of the midterms, they still have to admit it’s better than preparing for a midterm in Chemistry.

Unfortunately, the tests will only get more difficult from here-on-out, but for the moment I’m pleased to say that my freaking out over tests worth 30% of my grade was all for naught.

Back in 4th or 5th grade, I must have gotten on some sort of Nickelodeon mailing list, because I’ll occasionally get random Nick.com spam ads targeted at middle schoolers. I’ve been meaning to unsubscribe for a very long time, but I’m glad I didn’t - because yesterday, I was alterted to Nickelodeon’s “Kids Pick the President” message boards. Basically, it’s a bunch of pre-teens arguing about who they would vote for if they could (read: “spewing forth the political opinions of their parents in deliciously incompetent ways”). And dear god, it does an incredible job of explaining why people that age should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to.

Here are some of my favorite reasons posted on Nick.com for why you should support each candidate:

McCain:

• “[Obama] will raise our taxes. Kids, would you really want spend 5 dollors on a pack of gum?” - axel203
• “if obama wins this country as we know and love is going to fall” - grothglide
• “He has a great forgean Policie” -Tumbly123
• “You say Obama, I say NObama!!!! Have no pain,vote for McCain!!!! ” - ChicaGirli
• “Obama dosent put his hand over his heart during the pledge of allingence! ” -mcckaine08
• “Barack Housan Obama. That sounds remakably like a muslem terrorist name. It’s quite scary, really. ” - CatrinaCat
• “it’s not bush’s fault we are in the war” - PalinGirl
• “[Responding to reasons why you should vote for Obama] You must do a lot of recerching to find all of this out. You obvously care alot about politcs. All i have to say is who cares about politcs and, MCAIN ROCKS!!!” - elpaso14

Obama

• “John McCain is a very irritable, old, vicious man…Dare to contradict  me? I don’t think so.” -CrazyEgm
• “mccain is TOO old to run for president at the debate he will probably have a heart attack lol” -sgshorty11
• “we are officially in a resestion. a resestion is right before a deppresion. a depression is were NOBODY has money. We need a good president. Please make the right chose” - emm1381
• “my parents are democrat” - rainbowmoo

It’s funny, because aside from the grammar and spelling, these basically sum up the majority of reasons adults are choosing to vote for Obama or McCain. I did appreciate the one Nader supporter I found on the site though… Yet my favorite part of the site was still the usernames kids chose for themselves. You go, “ranbowmoo,” you go.

I’ve had this weird feeling over the past few weeks.

At first, I thought I was just having a strangely surreal week - my classes seemed off, hanging out with friends felt different, teachers weren’t treating me like they had for the first month of school… It was strange. Odd. And not in the “Perez Hilton is odd” way. Or even the “that squirrel appears to be gnawing on my hand” type of odd, either. Just weird.

And then I realized what I felt like - I felt like a college student. Short on sleep, malnourished, pissed off at my roommate and ready to kill for a week off. Suddenly it all made sense! So that’s what it feels like to be in college.

It’s a little sad, though. Because at the same time that I start to feel more like a college student, other freshman are beginning to feel more like college students as well. Which means they’re getting more comfortable in their surroundings. Which means they don’t mind ranting off they’re terribly narrow worldviews to everyone around them, whether we like it or not. I was in an elevator yesterday with two kids talking about how stupid and pointless all the film majors were.

It was an odd elevator trip for me, as I debated whether or not to inform these freshmen that not only were those the types of generalizations that separate those who make them from the civilized adult world, but that they might want to pay a little more attention to who can hear their juvenile conversations. I’m a peaceful film major. I know some non-peaceful, very scary film majors who could have been in the elevator instead…

About a week ago, I had this crazy idea. It was a Thursday, and we had the following Monday and Tuesday off for fall break. I was like, “Let’s go home!” Then I was like, “No, that’s ridiculous. I’d have to leave in like, 20 hours for it to be worth it.” Then I was like, “Duh. Let’s do it!” Part of me said, “Hmm, I don’t know…” Then the other part knocked the first part out, and 20 hours later, I was on a bus back to Virginia. Honestly, I’d been going a little stir-crazy here in New York. I love the city for the most part, but something about it was just irking me for a while there. Plus, it would have been another six weeks before I’d get another chance to eat Spudnuts or wander Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall aimlessly for hours. I mean, really.

Going back was slightly depressing - I went to a Homecoming afterparty one of my friends still in high school threw. The first reason it was depressing was that they plaed a Nancy Drew PC game until 5AM. But mostly it was sad remembering the types of friends I had in high school - which are very different from the types of friends you make at NYU, just by the very nature of the city.

For instance, I visited a small college in New Jersey a few weeks ago, and saw how close people in the dorms were. Since that dorm was pretty much 80% of the space the residents had to hang out in, they spent most of their time there, and it really was a type of giant family, always bursting in on each others’ rooms and spending hours together all the time. At NYU, you don’t get that as much. You’ve got five different dorms you know people in; you spend some time on your own hallway, but not enough to think of the other people there as your family…

It’s very much an independent school - which is one of the reasons I chose it. But visiting that college made me a little jealous of how close they all were…

How do you all feel about the idea of “community” in college?

I do love college. The classes, the city, the people, the homework… Let me rephrase: I love college, for the most part. So, just to make sure I never get too comfortable here (everyone needs occasional pessimistic complaint days - warning, I’m going to sound mean), here’s my list of the worst parts about college:

1. The food
I know, I know… I just wrote about how wonderful the food is here. But that’s the problem! After going to Bobby Flay’s restaurant on 5th Avenue with my mom last week, my unfortunate (but oh-so-delicious) addiction to food returned. Like, I didn’t think it was possible to eat pizza more often that I did at home. Ha. Hahaha. Oh, I was sooo wrong.  And NYU makes you feel bad about it, too - they list the calories for every food item in the dining halls. I’m sorry NYU, I didn’t really want to know that there were 584 Calories in each of the two slices of pizza I just ate, thank-you-very-much.

2. The people
Again, for the most part, I’m very happy with the other students here at NYU. It’s diverse, it’s open - and it’s as much or as little community as you want to make out of it. But so much of the idle chatter I’ve heard around campus makes me want to say one thing to the students of NYU: People are different from you. Get the hell over it.

3. The terrible cell phone coverage
I never had this much trouble with my cell phone in Charlottesville. Here, I can stand in one single spot on the sidewalk and have perfect 3G coverage one minute, and then absolutely nothing for ten minutes, and then maybe, maybe, service after I wait it out and keep dialing my number. It’s New York City. I want to make Tweets at any given moment of any given day!! Is that really so much to ask…?

4. The internet access
A) They don’t allow you to have a wireless router due to fears that NYU’s neighbors will hack in, bring down NYU’s network and it will be the end of the world (NYU is the center of the universe, after all). B) It seems like everyone’s torrentHogging bandwidth (that’s my word, by the way - spread it), and keeping me from my 30 Rock on Hulu. It want my Tina Fey! Give me my Tina Fey!

<3