Tale of a Shooting Star…

For those of you who did not know, I have been considering continuing my education by pursuing either the digital design diploma or one of the graphic design degrees from The Art Institute Online. However, the cost of a college education nowadays is pretty steep and having paid off all of the student loans for my previous college studies, I am loathe to take on an additional set of loans to pay for this expense.

The answer appears to have fallen in my lap in the form of a competition for a $10,000 scholarship being run by The Art Institute Online. The theme of the competition is Live Your Creative Passion. In order to enter, I had to come up with a graphic and write a short essay best representing this theme.

The first round of the competition is public voting via their website. The top 10% or 100 entries from this round will proceed to the second (and final) round where a panel of judges will comb through the entries and choose two winners.

Please help me by casting your vote for my entry here -> http://scholarship.aionline.edu/entry.aspx?id=929. Unfortunately, they butchered my graphic by cutting down the size and reducing the quality, but the concept is still intact.

One vote per email address is allowed, so if you have multiple email addresses, I would greatly appreciate as many votes as you can muster. If there is anyone that I may have missed on this list or who might be willing to help out by casting a vote for me, please forward on this information.

This is just getting ridiculous now. I got home last night and immediately did a small tweak to my scholarship entry and submitted it again. It’s now after 2:30 PM and they still have not sent me a link or posted my entry on their site. BAH!

To say that my temper is flaring right now, my anxiety is through the roof and I’m wound up like a top pretty much covers how I’m feeling. I’ve had a rather short fuse this week anyway and this just seals it for me.

I’ve written to the person that my admissions rep. put me in contact with yesterday, just to see what’s going on. I haven’t heard back, but I only sent the email a little while ago. My patience is just non-existent today.

I woke up terribly late (we didn’t get in to work until after 1 PM), which is unheard of for both of us, my joints are suddenly so achy that I can barely move and walking up the flight of stairs to the mezzanine where I work was a big ordeal. I should have taken the elevator, except rumor has it that people have gotten stuck in it before. 😆

I think I need to take some deep breaths and I really wish that I had one of my take-one-as-needed-if-you-are-really-freaking-out extra anti-anxiety pills with me. I haven’t had to take one of those in a couple of months, so it tells you what kind of state I’m in.

But, I’m going to pursue this scholarship opportunity to the ends of the earth, darn it! I’m not a quitter. I even went so far as to email all of the entry information to the contact person to make sure he (or someone) can post it manually, if needed. I refuse to let this slip through my fingers because I didn’t pursue it hard enough.

Hopefully, I will be posting again soon with a link to my entry! 😀

Today is my day to be ill-tempered, I think. I’ve been in a meeting all morning and when we let out at noon, with lunch vouchers in hand, there wasn’t enough food left in the cafeteria for all of us. Grrr… from my brain and my stomach.

I went out to The Art Institute Online’s page today to check on the scholarship competition because I still have not heard anything. I find that they have posted hundreds of entries. I crawl through every single one of them – TWICE – to find that mine is not amongst them, despite the confirmation email that I received from their system on Friday night.

I call the toll-free number on their website to get some help. I wait on hold for 5 minutes, then get transferred to their generic voice mail. I call the admissions person that’s been hounding me. No answer. Finally called him back again, left a message and sent an email, as well. Thankfully, he was prompt in helping to get me in touch with the proper person. I get an email from another AIO employee, stating that they experienced a “technical glitch” on Friday and some entries were not received. So, I have to resubmit my entry. Not a major problem, except that my essay is on my laptop here at work and the graphic is at home, so I cannot re-enter until I get home tonight. To say I am a bit agitated is an understatement. I just really want to rush home and post my entry ASAP!

I will lose a couple of hours of public voting edge on my competitors who are already posted on the website. Hopefully, you will be able to help me gain some ground, when my entry goes up. There is some talented competition in the mix and a lot of entries to wade through, so I don’t think that I can hope for much in the way of random entries via browsing. So, as soon as it is posted, I will let everyone that I know, know. And hopefully those people will let others know, and so on and so forth. I’ll need all of the votes that I can get if I want to get my entry in front of the judges. 😀

I think I just won a limbo contest. I just submitted my scholarship entry, with brief essay (500 words or less), with less than 15 minutes to spare. Could you hear the *squeak* from wherever you are? 😉

After spending over 12 hours on creating a graphic that expresses the topic of Live Your Creative Passion, here’s what I ended up with:

It’s not perfect, but you know what? As I told Terry, if it was totally sophisticated and professional-looking, then I wouldn’t need the scholarship! 😆

They will email me when my entry is posted on Monday and then I will start sending out mad emails and posting here.

I came to a terrible realization last night as I was writing my last post. But let me preface that with some background information first.

I have been contemplating for over a year now going back to school, in a sense. I know that I have some innate artistic skills and ever since my grandfather died a year and a half ago (he was a professional graphic artist), the desire to get in touch with and grow those skills has become much stronger. Partially as a tribute to my grandfather and partially because I was not allowed to develop those skills naturally as a child, so now I wish to honor both him and myself by seeing how far I can go with it. I really want to foster my creativity and see what I can blossom into.

I have been looking at the options available from the Art Institute Online. The schools that are available with the official name of The Art Institute are well-known and well-respected in the artistic communities in this country. It truly means something if you can come away with a degree from an Art Institute. The fact that they have an online division, with very thoroughly thought-out programs and specially trained faculty for their online classes merely adds additional weight. And, of course, I found out that my grandfather had graduated from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, PA many years ago, and the fact that The Art Institute Online is actually a division of The Art Institute of Pittsburgh threw in an extra bit of appeal for me.

Anyway, I have been mulling this over for quite some time and have even filled out (but not submitted) an application to the school. One of the major things holding me back is the money. I really don’t know if I want to invest $15,000 in a Digital Design Diploma program when I cannot expect tangible results that will help me to make that money back easily. 15K is a lot to spend just to satisfy my own curiosity about whether or not I can actually do this. Of course, it would also bolster my self-confidence when it comes to the design work that I already do, but still… there’s not enough solid value attached to it for me to want to make that kind of investment on my own.

I had approached my sponsors at work about having the company help to pay for this additional education, but they were unable to see how it would relate to what I am doing and add value. I won’t bother going into explaining my rationale right now, but I do have a correlation worked out and having a graphic artist in-house would save them from having to throw so many jobs to consulting firms. So, I was back to the scenario of having to pay for everything myself.

Then, all of a sudden, a couple of weeks ago, I received an email in my inbox from The Art Institute Online that I nearly deleted without really looking at it. It was concerning a contest that they are running for a $10,000 scholarship. I ignored it, at first, assuming that I wouldn’t be eligible or doubting that I could ever even possibly have a chance at it. But the seed was planted, and it kept growing in my brain and making itself known to me every once in a while. I finally decided that here was my answer – right in front of my face! I read through the requirements, figured out that I met them and even threw together a rough idea in my head. And that is where things stayed.

So, now we come to last night. I’ve had the scholarship information up on my computer for the past week or so, so I see it every time I go upstairs and work on my computer. Last night, as I was waiting for my piece to scan, I realized that the deadline for entry is TODAY!

Hence the E E E E E E E EEEEEEEEK! Fortunately, some of my best work is done at the last minute, so I am still going to take a shot at it. I am staying home today, taking a half day or even a full day off from work, as needed, and I am going to cobble together all of my thoughts into a coherent and hopefully effective entry.

Once I submit my entry, I will actually need your help, as the scholarship contest has two phases. The first is a public popularity contest. All of the entries will be posted on a website and the public will be able to go and vote for the entries. Only one vote per email address, so those of you with multiple email addresses, I’m counting on you to vote with everything you have! Only the most popular entries will go on to the second phase of the contest, where they will be judged by a panel of professionals.

If it’s meant to be, it will happen for me. I am excited for the chance, at least, but now I need to get to work!!!!!!!!!!!