So far I’ve administered surveys to three people in the MFA program and came back with some interesting ideas. Here are some of them:
1. personality proposal for the MFA. What is it that makes Pratt special, and what makes it a good program? What does a prospective student see/feel and what do they feel they’re going to be a part of? I envisioned a poster with many “identities” that asks students “what identity do you propose?” and the poster could have many different faces (happy, snobby, angry, etc – or more design-related)
2. Tradition is key, and happy hour would be really beneficial for the group to build interpersonal relationships. Events planned in studio would be too inhibited because it’s difficult to separate from our school personas. Events need to be breezy and outside of school.
3. Alumni network – we want to network with the entire department not just the MFA team. Something that Brenda and I have worked on in the past on cc, to build programs and publications to bridge that divide. Pratt ComD currently has no alumni network. People I’ve contacted were found completely on my own. We could create a yearbook where each student has their own page.
4. General agreement that there are different standards in the MS program, but creating community among us is key. There are very talented MS students that chose to stay in the program for various reasons and maintaining that connection is key. Also being insular in the MFA will not be beneficial to Pratt ComD overall – you lose the cross-pollination of ideas, and learning from different courses. Also it creates a strange working environment because of shared space.
5. Screening room would be a welcome break and we could use the classroom over the weekends.
6. agreement that confusion over meeting times is unsettling and confusing.
7. Start from the assumption that we’re all one ComD instead of the outlook that we’re doing work for our MFA program.
In terms of framing the problem, we started out wanting to unify the two programs and started realizing that community needs to be formed within each one first. Now it seems like we’re trying to do both.