If you look around NCSA you see students running on too little sleep, drinking too much coffee, scrambling for time for their art, and always on the verge of mental breakdown. Arts students are by nature unbalanced, but that isn't always a crucial thing to being an artist- or a good thing. There's an adage that goes, "Just because nobody understands you doesn't mean you're an artist." This quote is true, but I think the brunt of our problems here at NCSA lie in the fact that, well, nobody understands artists.

Before I get too much into it, I should preface by saying that I am not trying to blame or rail on anyone, as this entire article could probably be taken as a personal attack on any particular person or department of this school if someone decided to read into it enough. No, I'm not trying to rain the mighty wrath of Will down on residence life or pick on Aramark because they don't cook the pizzas all the way; all I am trying to do is offer a few tips to make this school a more conducive environment for artists.

I spent a bit of time recently going through old pictures of the campus, talking to old students, and thinking back on my first year at NCSA. I realized that NCSA has changed pretty drastically even during the three years I've been here. While our current time at NCSA is an exciting one- a new chancellor, West Side Story, Our Town, etc.- I still miss what I used to love most about this school.

If you look through the old yearbooks, you see pictures galore of students hanging out, playing music together, or goofing around. NCSA used to have a homecoming (in which NCSA played against the Wake Forest football team), complete with bonfires, and I even found a picture of a pig (yes, a full pig) being roasted outside over an open fire during Beaux Arts. However, the biggest impression I got was that students were just having fun, and sometimes it seems like fun is missing from NCSA nowadays.

When I talked to Joey Ruggero, a trumpet player who has been here 6 years, he said his most enduring memory of high school here was the people. "Everybody knew each other," he said. "Today the school is very cliquish, but it used to be that everybody knew everybody else. [Before the connector building,] there used to be a giant field behind the high school dorms, and, when it was warm, there would always be people outside either playing or watching other people play sports. Everybody just hung out and had fun."

One of the biggest shortfalls I feel this school has as far as not offering a conducive environment has to do with the campus. As far as college campuses go, NCSA's isn't bad. However, over the past couple years much of the school's greenery has been rapidly disappearing. In addition, the slopes of the school are not natural looking, and the mass amount of fertilizer used on the flower gardens, shrubs, and trees, in addition to being ascetically unpleasing, smells awful. This is part of a bigger problem of trying to make the students feel accepted and at home while on campus- a place where they can shed all their problems, relax, and be artists.

As a whole, the students of NCSA have lucked out. Our campus is fairly spacious, has relatively nice buildings (save a few recent additions) and our campus is just about to hit that magical time when all the flowers and trees burst in to full bloom. What I'm talking about here is that chance NCSA has to go the extra mile, and the little subtleties that make this place actually feel like home. For one thing, the older buildings on this campus have carpeted floors and low ceilings, a point that my dad made on when he visited the school last month (Specifically first floor gray). However, the areas of the campus that should actually appear intimate, like the commons and the dormitories, give off about as much of a friendly vibe as the women's prison the HS dorms were modeled after. For example, my sister (visiting with my dad) noticed the high ceilings in the commons and the connector building, and remarked on the primary school colors used on the second floor of the commons, saying she "Šfelt like [she] was back in preschool."

Another point mentioned was that it seemed like the internal designers of NCSA sometimes went for style over comfort. For example, in the connector building the sofas are rather hard, though very futuristic and stylish. And the benches on first and third floor gray, though spacey, are hard as rocks.

A massive oversight on the part of the school was the construction of the connector building. Before its construction, each of the dorms was a tight-knit community, where everybody knew each other. In order to hang out, students had to go to the commons, where they would not only hang out with others from their studios or classes, but students from different art forms; highschoolers and college students were one and the same. Now, such tightknit relationships between such wide age groups are highly discouraged. When the connector building came along, it prompted the elimination of greenery, and also provided a way for students to ignore one another.

While I promised myself not to make this into an article bashing the administration, I find it imperative to say that the environment created by some of the stricter rules is one of the biggest challenges facing a student trying to have a positive experience at NCSA. At a school where the turnover rate from year to year is approximately 75%, the newer students should not be blamed for mistakes made by the old. Students can feel when they are not being trusted, and this school is above all else, an arts school. We should not be censored, scared, uncomfortable, depressed, or have the feeling in any way of being institutionalized. The number one initiative should be to make a great place for students to learn their art.

permanent link: http://www.kudzugazette.com/mar1207/campus.php