Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

The politics are interesting, but predictable and usually die out by junior year. Everyone gets hard critiques and even best friends know they should be pushing each other to be amazing and not let bullshit slide, that's the point of being there.

It's difficult to justify in some ways. Most of the practice-based work I'm doing I wouldn't really show as commercial art, it's introverted and 'academic' (in a Fine Art sense). Things like simulating a DDos of an online artwork and looking at that as a performance within the history of iconoclasm. Also anything technical is self-taught so I feel fairly certain I couldn't step into a coding role straight away - too many holes.

However, I've learned loads of assembly, python and general reverse-engineering skills and really smart & weird people constantly make me prove the point of what I'm doing within a context that I believe in. It's a context that's not exactly native to the materials I'm using, none of my peers have experience with what I'm doing on a technical level, so I'm forced to both "code switch" with my language during critique + think about computers in a way I never would in a CS degree (having spoken to many people with CS degrees). I love it. Art school forces you to lay down your own markers. Mine are that in the end I like what I'm making and I hope that it can add a small piece to our knowledge.

I graduated with a tech degree and was able to freely move around the broadcast television and animation world, with a huge amount of creative input because I understood the problem space and the underlying tools.

I also had the confidence to branch out from 'engineer' to 'creative professional' able to be earning money for the companies I worked for due to this creative/tech crossover skillset, an 'engineer' is an expense, not a revenue earner under normal circumstances.

If I had wanted to work on the shows I worked on but had taken a traditional approach to getting there, then I would have had to have done an eternity of 'runner' jobs or have been born with the 'right' parents for nepotism to do it for me. But I found the tech avenue to be wide open, back then it was SGI machines and none of the runners were clamouring to read the SGI manuals. It wasn't important for me to 'mix with the stars' but I did very much enjoy working with a lot of different specialists all at the top of their game.