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Spring is Here!

Congrats on almost finishing your second semester with Living Arts!  This past semester had many exciting things going on, including completion of your CCP's and presenting them at the Symposium!  Hopefully you all have enjoyed your time with Living Arts, and whether you are coming back again next year as a peer mentor, or going out into the wider campus community next year as an Alum, hopefully you have gained many valuable skills and new perceptions of creativity! 

Contents

  • Spring is Here!
  • Community Spotlights
  • Congratulations 2016-2017 Peer Mentors!
  • 2016 Symposium
  • All-Community Meetings Recap

Coming Soon...

this semester's Alumni project, a photo mosaic of Bursley Hall, composed of Living Arts Student photo submissions is in the works!

Community Spotlights!

 

Sara Eskandari

First-Year Student


Sara Eskandari is a current first-year student in our program who will be joining us again next year as a peer mentor!  As a student in the Art School, she really enjoyed the positive creative energy of Living Arts and how open people are to trying different things.  She said that her time with Living Arts “has been absolutely fantastic” and was the “best decision she made for college.”   Some creative pursuits she has been involved in on campus include helping out on the Iron Man Team with website design and painting the set for a production called “Big Fish”.  Most of these opportunities she says she would not have known about if she hadn’t been in Living Arts, since she found out about them from peer mentors and fellow students.  

 

    On the intersection of disciplines found in the community Sara said she enjoyed seeing people “being intelligent” about other things in Art, by pulling in concepts from engineering and other disciplines.  There is a lot of technology that DFA students need to learn, and this helped her realize how important engineering is, especially when it comes to all the coding and work that goes into creating websites that isn’t always obvious.  
    Next year she wants to come back as a peer mentor because she says that coming into college was great because the peer mentors were there to help.  She liked how peer mentors are able to make information about UofM readily available in a non-intimidating setting and she wants to do the same for next year’s incoming students.

Chelsea Pugh

Alumna

Chelsea Pugh, former Living Arts student and Peer Mentor, is now working in San Francisco as a Software Engineer for Apple.  She also enjoys playing board games, hiking, and baking in her spare time. When asked how Living Arts helped her with her career and other life goals after graduation, here is what she said:

"I met some of my best friends in college in Living Arts, and still keep in touch with them to this day. I’m always eager to see what they’re up to because all of them have such different paths. Living Arts helped me see perspectives other than my own and to look at things not just as an engineer, but as an artist. Today, when I need to prototype for my job, or when I’m making music in my spare time, I have the confidence to try ideas out and put them into action. I like having a job where I do one thing that uses creativity and then going home and having hobbies that use creativity in totally different ways. I think meeting a lot of people with multidisciplinary interests through Living Arts really helped me to get excited about stuff in college besides just my major.

In a way, some people I work with at Apple are like the people I met in Living Arts. They’re software engineers but all have different backgrounds like biology or music technology. I think that having people with different backgrounds working on projects together encourages the success of the project since its not designed just for one demographic. Working on multidisciplinary teams (formally and informally) in Living Arts helped me both professionally and with meeting people outside of my profession.”
 

- Chelsea Pugh, class of 2015

Congratulations 2016-2017 Peer Mentors!

Living Arts is proud to welcome 20 returning students as peer mentors for next year!  Peer mentoring keeps the Living Arts community spirit going strong so we are glad to have such an awesome group carrying that on.
Peer Mentors for next year are:  Samantha Beauchamp, Mitchell Curtiss, Sara Eskandari, Gladys Gonzalez, Amandha Goriparthi, Srishti Gupta, Alex Holland, Kevin Yiwei Huang, Daniel Korth, Alexander Kraft, Alex Maynard, Bailey McMillian, Zach Mused, Jake Phillips, Alex Philpott, Sophie Raymer, Stephanie Sim, Caroline Uy, Natan Zamansky and Clayton Zimmerman.

2016 Symposium

Congratulations Living Artists on an amazingly creative 2016 Symposium!  Held on April 9th, this years theme was "Summits" and featured Collaborative Creative Projects (CCP's) that ranged from videos, to 3-D printed sculptures and pop-up books, to photographic chronicles of adventures.  After the students presented their projects to their peers, a vote was taken to nominate the best project.  This year's winner was an interactive world created in Minecraft called "Summit Crafting", made by the group led by peer mentor Nick Shahin.  Projects are on display in the Duderstadt Gallery from April 9th-15th.

 
 

All-Community Meetings Recap

All-Community Meeting's, CCP's

This semester's All-Community Meetings focused on Collaborative Creative Project development, giving students time to brainstorm, prototype and iterate their final projects.