Today is the day! The open house mentor session/party is finally here! We spent all morning arranging and setting up tables and projects for the party, while continuing to prepare for the mentor sessions.

After lunch our first mentor session with Marius Watz began. I was nervous in the beginning, but he was super nice and really easy to have a conversation with so my nerves were gone instantly. He mostly gave us what he called the ‘scared straight’ speech, which is for people who are considering becoming artists. I really appreciated his rather brutal honesty and learned so much that I hadn’t really thought about or known before. Thanks Marius!

After a quick mingle break, we regrouped for our mentor session with Kyle McDonald. Kyle also gave us some insight into how to keep doing what we’re doing at SFPC, what his creative process is like, and went over a few specific projects of his with us. It was a lot of fun speaking with him. Thank you Kyle!

After finishing up the mentor sessions, we continued prepping, and then the party began. This was my first experience at an exhibition and it turned out to be really fun! It was nice to speak with people who are genuinely interested in your work and I Learned about a few more tools to try from some of the people who stopped by. It was also great to get a chance to see what other students were working on as well. Everyone is just so talented and I enjoyed all of their projects. During the party, there was also a ‘graduation ceremony’ where everyone received an award from the teachers. Mine was ‘Most likely to rewrite Shakespeare with floating point NaNs’ which is based on a bug I had in my code for a mini project I was working on. All the awards were really well thought out and fit the students perfectly. The night was a huge success. Thank you so much to all the teachers and students for their work in putting the day/night together! I had so much fun!