The Last Blog

By Drew Baldwin

As the semester comes to a close and being as this is the last blog of the year, I feel it’s appropriate to do a wrap up of the year and a small look to the coming months. In a couple weeks, I will be participating in the graduation ceremony for the second time in a year, which seems crazy; however, this time there’s only 3 months of school left not 15. Coming into the first studio over the summer last year, I didn’t really know what to expect and within the first week we all got a pretty good idea of the pace of the summer studio and how much we would have to be working in a week. Luckily as the summer went on, though the pace didn’t change, we all became more accustomed to the work load and being able to get our work done without stressing too much.

                  Going from summer to fall seemed like a huge change, at least in pace. We went from having something do every day, 4 days a week in the summer, to 3 studios a week with extra days in between to work. Not to say that fall studio was easy, it was a challenge as well, but it was a different feel from the summer studio. With other classes in the schedule, it does help to have the occasional break from studio work, because after the summer, only having studio you can be a little worn out from doing it almost every day of the week. In all, I was pleased with both the summer and fall studios, and the products I produced in them.

                  Now to the spring semester. As we all know, spring means thesis here, though work doesn’t begin at the beginning of the spring semester but more at the beginning in the fall. Choosing a thesis was probably one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make, because I want to do something that will be a viable project to present during the summer, one that could help me find employment in the future, but most importantly be something I will actually be interested in working on. For most of the fall, I had no idea what I was going to do, but as it drew closer to January I really had to start narrowing down my choices until I finally decided on the Urban Farming Community in Detroit.

                  As the end of the semester, my thesis begins to start taking its final form to be presented in the next couple months. The focus now is just making final decisions and putting together a presentation. Though it’s getting close to the end, it’s becoming difficult to find new things to add and deciding whether or not to keep designing or leaving things as they are. As of now, I am pleased with where I am and look forward to the end of the semester as well as finishing my thesis all together over the summer.