I read with interest the latest going-ons about an art education on Mr. Alec Soth’s blog and The Online Photographer. It’s highly pertinent to me at this point in my life when I’m facing a wide variety of choices with no concrete plan in mind.
I have been talking to some of my friends from the inaugural photography major batch at the university on the other side of the island. They are not so optimistic about the future: employment in the already crowded creative industry here seems bleak. Their relatives sneer at them for going to art school, Why can’t he/she be normal and go to engineering school?
How can an art degree help somebody in a pragmatic society like Singapore? We have been inundated since we started primary school to study hard, get a(n) engineering/medical/law degree, earn big bucks, marry, buy a house/car and live happily ever after. Choosing to pursue one’s passion seems like a crazy idea. The only possible option for an art education would be to teach in that field and produce more disillusioned students.
I remember a conversation over coffee once when they were rather shocked at my declaration that I wanted to read up art history on my own - a subject that they wanted to forget. To them, I may be luckier as I still get to pursue the passion; instead of slaving away for that GPA and an unknown future.
However, I’m also at the crossroads, wondering where I will turn ahead. A career in photography would be good if I can make ends meet…but how long could I sustain in that field? Freelancing now, I haven’t had a job in almost four months. Seeing how all my friends in business school are attending all the career talks, I feel a pang of jealousy. At least that looks like a more viable choice. I could always bow to that and get myself a proper job when I graduate (I believe my friends from art school would face more problems), at the expense of my passion now. Yet, when you cannot hardly feed yourself, how could you be expected to create great art?
I was talking to Geoff over coffee last week that if you wanted to survive doing photography in Singapore, you had to:
1) be born in a rich family
2) be extremely hardworking
3) be very lucky
4) teach
Given odds like this, I’m seriously considering my next step in life.
With that, I would still want to applaud my art school friends for their choice, to brave the odds and do something almost everybody scoffs at. That requires guts that hopefully would bring them far in the future. And I do enjoy my conversations with them, I do not get intellectual stimulations of that sort with my very few friends in school.
during highschool i thought that i wanted to study photography and foreign languages in university but ended up studying computer science because i thought it would be more practical (in very american form my parents told me to study anything that made me happy) … i was interested in computer science but was also neglecting a big part of what i was interested.
i ended up working 8 years writing software, made tons of money in the internet thing that happened and then lost it all too. now i’m teaching ashtanga yoga in bangkok and spending all my free time (and money) being involved with photography and language study. sort of strange how it all happened really, and i have absolutely where it will take me.
you know, i started this post with the intention of telling you to follow your dreams … but now i think my advice is to go with the flow of things. there is no reason you need to stick with one career for your whole life. i’m 30 years old now and am looking into going back to university to get a bachelors in the thai language and also finding a way to study art more formally.
hmmm in your list above, you forgot to mention marrying rich :)
Heya luke, i’m pretty much doing that right now. Just going with the flow. Not sure where it will take me though! Strangely, I kinda lost my dreams on the way here…then again, maybe it’s just because I’ve been feeling so uninspired at the moment.
Maybe tomorrow will be better. :)
hello yaohung,
There are many things to consider, and everyone considers different things. i had a similar choice and these are some of the things i considered.
Which is easier?
~there are many benefits of having a job that you don’t Hate, and i job that is less Grueling.
Which is more lucrative?
~Like it or not, Money is important. Money affects almost everything, and it is a source of major Worry, for everyone.
Which do you Enjoy more?
~Obviously important, but I think most people don’t consider enjoyment enough.
What job will be more Challenging?
~Significantly more important than people realize, if you can be great at your job in less than 5 years it probably isn’t challenging enough.
Which job has longer hours?
~The longer you spend working for someone else the less time you can be doing what you love.
Which job inspires more creativity?
~a tough question, because I have found my non-creative job often inspires much more desire and inspiration for creation than some job using creativity. I feel that being surround by an environment of logic and lack of creativity 8 hours a day invigorates my joy of creation.
For me, I choose to go the business route doing software support for some accounting software. It sounds horrible, i admit, but it has been a great choice for me. A day spent at a desk is easy, more lucrative, likely more challenging, shorter hours, and may likely inspire your creativity more than many of the other jobs you would have to do to supplement your creativity.
i’ll admit you may not enjoy it more than doing photography all day, but I don’t think that’s the only question to ask.
My worry is that if I may have the money, I may have neither time nor health (due to long working hours in a dank stinky office) to pursue my other interests and fall into a typical 9-6-TV-Sleep ritual masquerading as life.
Then again, I’m always too fatalistic for my own good sometimes!
Hey, at least you have experience freelancing and you know people will hire you for photography. I have that same feeling too, watching my friends go for career talks, but in this case it’s my personal choice to not go into a line like finance (which i abhor) and look toward the photography industry. And yeah, I kinda suck at photography too. But Willy has offered me a job, not as a photographer of course, just as someone doing marketing/logistics/admin, and to be honest, I’d probably be pretty happy just doing that. Hmm. Not much point in my comment. Just to say, I understand. Kinda. *pats*
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