Ceramics

In ceramics, you will be told the required things to do, get your materials from the cabinets and begin working. It could be glazing, forming the clay for the project itself, rolling out a slab first or getting ready to turn in a dried or glazed project. If your project needs to be fired, you need to fill out a slip for it to be fired, checking off which steps you've done efficiently for the requirements. You have to take photos of your project during the greenware [not yet dry clay] stage, bisqueware [dry/white], pre-glaze firing [glaze complete, ready to be fired] and completion stages [fully glazed and fired, finished]. Carefulness of layering with glaze is crucial; when glazing, you have to have three layers [which you mark with a check mark for each layer on a separate paper to keep track] in total unless it is a squeeze bottle detail [in which case, one layer is efficient since it fills in a gap].

Photography

At the beginning of the semester, you experimented with the camera often, taking five photos or so of given prompts to experiment with the use of the school cameras. If you don't have a camera, one will be provided for you when at-home assignments begin, which is around the second or third week of the first semester. You are expected not to use your phone camera, and for at-home assignments, you are expected to do them at home and not in class or on campus. You must use any digital camera other than a phone or device camera, the school given one being a Canon camera. I have a canon camera at home, which makes it easier to find the settings required for each photography assignment through my own camera. Despite it not being the same model, and being a bit larger than the school ones, it is easy to find the settings required for a specific assignment due to it also being a Canon camera. She does give thorough tutorials on how to find the settings on the camera by having one person at each desk illustrate how to get there [and show it to the entire table] using the school given camera, and it is relatively simple to navigate these settings. The goal is to get everyone accustomed to using the digital camera rather than snapping with a phone. She wants everyone to use the viewfinder as much as possible so that we aren't too distracted by the screen of the camera itself. You can do any editing you'd like with at-home photo assignments, but black and white editing is required for on-campus assignments which are assigned at the beginning of the semester. You make a contact sheet, then choose the best photo fit for the assignment. You do have to print it out yourself, the instructions for which are on a piece of paper beside the printing computers.

Communications

At the beginning, there are icebreakers, but simply to get you used to the environment and more at peace with your classmate to avoid anxiety from your classmates. You are encouraged to give eye contact when presenting, even if it means looking at everyone's foreheads. If a student mentions a game, the professor will often relate to their frustrations or rants about it [ex. a game not coming out with the next part for years]. He relates to the students well, and often goes off on tangents mid-presentation because everyone seems a bit bored. He'll say something like, "hey guys I know this is boring, do you want me to tell a story that happened to me?" and he'll say the most random story and go on about it to distract us from the boredom. It makes the presentations far more bearable and less difficult to bear, and even though the presentations are relatively extensive, he often adds humorous elements to it or explains it in depth in such an interesting tone that it makes it far less boring. Along with this, the presentations don't occur often, usually only a few times before we have to present the speech. He gives many tips on presentations using examples from his old classes and explains what would be most efficient. Many people in the class are in their 20s-30s, but this means that they are more mature and respectful than high schoolers, so presenting is more comfortable with a more mature audience that relates to you and has a deeper sense of maturity than a teenager.