Cyner-G’s Journal

The answer is……42.

I told you that you weren’t going to like it. Thanks Adams. I have learned in my over 88 credit hours of college work that it’s not always about the answers. You have to know what you are asking first or the answers may make no sense.
You could go into a career counselor’s office and ask them “What career should I go into?”

How the heck could they know that? They don’t know you!! They don’t know what books make your soul queasy, or what artwork you loathe, or what you think you are good at, or what you really are good at, or what you have been interested in since you were in diapers. Go ask your mom.

What my counselors did was give me personality and interest tests. Fine and dandy if you are obsessed with being a fireman, or a lawyer or math, or grammar, or art, or physics, or history, or playing in the mud, or building stuff. even better for you if your learning style is reading and writing. But what if you are genuinely interested in art AND physics AND psychology AND history AND chemistry AND design? Oops, no quiz for you. And what happens if you are a kinetic or audio or visual learner and you just don’t “get” multiple choice, fill in the blank, vaguely phrased quizzes? I haven’t found much of a solution for that anywhere.
You see, I am one of the many out there who know better than the right side/left side of the brain thing. I’m both. I have done almost equally well in my physics classes and my art classes. (Almost? More on that later) But so many of the quizzes I have taken put me into tiny little slots that ignore the rest of my interests. One quiz said the career that best fit me is……brace yourself, animation geeks….. a dictionary editor. I believe this was the 291 question PAPER version of the Strong’s Interest Inventory.
It has taken me about three years, in college alone, to figure out what I want to do for a career. Some days I’m still not certain, but I keep coming back to Special Effects and Animation.

So how do we animation students figure this out?

Questions. I sometimes like to ask questions over and over again, phrasing them differently each time. Now, I am not trying to undermine the interviewee’s authority, or doubting that they are telling the truth, or implying that they don’t know what they are talking about. They could be giving me the right answer all the time, a very knowledgeable, thorough  answer. But what if it’s the answer to the wrong question? I try to make sure I ask the right questions, or the best answer in the world could be a waste of my time,and theirs.

Shading the basics. Graphite a long time ago!!

Well, now you know the secret to a great career. It’s 42.