WAS ART SCHOOL WORTH IT? Why I Dropped Out of USC Film + Changed Majors to Art | Spring Admit

Hello Internet! My name is Sophia Mitropoulos, I am an artist and a creative and today I wanted to make this to talk to you about my art school experience. I studied film and media at a performing arts high school in New York City which led me to the USC film school as a spring admit, and then I ultimately dropped out of the film school and switched my major to art and graduated with a BA in fine art. So this is the story of how all that played out and my honest reaction to my experiences in all of those places. My art school path definitely wasn't as linear as other people's seem to have been, so I hope that by sharing my story it can give you some insight onto some less traditional ways of ending up with an art degree. So without further ado, let's get into it.

I couldn't tell my art school story fully without starting a little bit before college - actually, I couldn't tell this story without starting kind of at the beginning. I grew up in New York City where the public school system works a lot like it does everywhere else in the country where you go to your local elementary school and your local middle school until high school. High school in New York City is a completely different story. In eighth grade, New York City students are handed a book that's about this thick and every page represents a high school. Students have a couple of weeks to look over the book with their family and pick some schools and then they fill out an application.

That's right - eighth graders apply to high school. You choose a school to attend when you are 13 years old. That is a lot of pressure to put on thirteen year old, but I digress. You're given a sheet of paper that had 12 blank spots and each spot represented a school. You could pick up to 12 schools from the book. You also could select a program within a school, so you could be applying to the same school but two different programs for example. Every school has a different application system beyond that. Some schools require an audition, some schools require an interview, some schools require an additional test. The general rule of thumb in that system is that the first high school that you get into is the one that you attend. So if you get rejected from your first option but you get into your second option, you would go there and so on. And at any point in this process you could just choose to attend your local high school instead. I think I had eight schools on my list when I applied.

The school that I was accepted to is called Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. On my application I applied to their art school and their film and media program. I had done some ceramics as a kid which was what was in my portfolio but I had never done any drawing and the art audition involved a live model. So not only had I never drawn from life before, but I also remember very distinctly not knowing how to foreshorten a knee. I remember sitting there and looking at this guy's knee and thinking there's no chance that I'm gonna get into this program - and guess what? I didn't! Okay, so that's fine, I got into the film program. Not my first choice... or my second... or my third... or my fourth... but it was my fifth choice, and it wasn't my last. And I didn't have another option, so I went.

In a performing arts high school, you take the regular curriculum that everybody else in every regular high school takes, and then on top of that you take your creative major. So as a film media student I would have two periods of film per day every day and then alternating with my gym class would be an additional period of film which was like kind of adjacent class. So it wasn't film production class, it was either film critique or film history or something like that. Honestly there are so many things that I learned in that program that I still use in my life to this day that I think it's just ridiculous.

When it came to applying to college I thought that I didn't want to go to art school because I wanted to learn "other things." That was my wording, and I'll be honest I was prioritizing schools that were in warm climates because I wanted to leave New York winters. At the time I embraced filmmaking as my creative outlet I dove headfirst into film. I was working all the time on creative projects, whether they were school projects or my own personal projects. I was doing like montages of my life all the time, lots of what would now be probably a vlog but I didn't think to put them on YouTube. But I kind of thought that because I wasn't in the art program at Frank Sinatra that meant that I couldn't go to art school. I thought that either you learn how to do art at 14 or you never have a chance, so I was like okay, film? I guess that's it. And I did really enjoy editing as creative outlet, it was something that I was proficient in and excited about and I felt like I could express myself - although not fully. So I was like, "Okay this is a cool path for me to go down, let's do it."

My first choice school was the University of Southern California. How could it not be, right? They have the best film program in the country and it's based in sunny beautiful LA. I also had never been there and I think the collective understanding of USC from where I was coming from was that it was the West Coast NYU, which, spoiler alert- it's not. And actually my high school advisor told me that I shouldn't apply because she didn't think that I would get in. At the time there was this app called College Prowler which I think has rebranded, but one of the things that College Prowler would do was that it would predict your likelihood of getting into a certain school based on the information you gave it, like your SAT scores or grades, things like that.

It gave me a zero percent chance of getting in.

And then I got in.

Like, I GOT IN to USC Film School.

Like, what?? I got into USC film school??

I opened my acceptance letter, which I coincidentally have - this is it - and I'll walk you through my experience. So I got the big yellow envelope right? And then I got the big red envelope inside of it, and I opened it up, and it said that and I freaked out I freaked out. The day that I got this letter I was babysitting nearby my house and my mom got it in the mail and booked it over to the house that I was babysitting at, knocked on the door and held it up, and I started sobbing. Like sobbing. But so I'm sobbing there with my mom and I opened this up and it says Welcome to the Trojan family and I am just floored with excitement and then I opened the second part of it and it says this. "This is to certify that Sophia Louise Mitropoulos has been admitted to the University of Southern California with all rights and privileges accorded thereto.

And then at the bottom it says" Semester: Spring 2014 Which meant I was a spring admit. Rough.

Okay, so I start in the spring. Of course I'm still gonna go, it's my dream school, how could I not? And even though USC was my first choice school, I wasn't actually accepted into my first choice program within the school. I wanted to be in the production track which notoriously is extremely time-consuming but I had been selected for the Critical Studies Program, which is basically it's like an English major but about filmmaking if that makes sense. And I figured it's still in the School of Cinematic Arts, and even though it's a vastly different curriculum I thought, well it's already a foot in the door. Maybe I can get there and switch to production once I arrive.

Some schools, if you get accepted for the spring you have to go to a different school and prove that you can get there. USC doesn't work that way, for a spring admit if you get in for the spring, you start in the spring and that's it. You can do whatever you want in the fall. So my fall semester of my freshman year I went to a state school in New York called SUNY New Paltz knowing that I would have to leave at the end of the semester to go to SC. I actually ended up loving New Paltz and I had a really hard time leaving even though I knew the whole time that that was gonna be the case. Because my time wasn't being taken up by film while I was there, I started competitively weightlifting and I kind of dove into that and all my free time went towards training. But we'll get back to that later.

Okay, so I get to SC, I'm a Critical Studies student, we're in school Cinematic Arts, we're living the life, it's happening, right? My first semester there I had already taken some prerequisite classes at New Paltz so I was ready to get started in the film curriculum. So I took three film classes and one required writing class. One of the classes I took that semester is called 190 and it's like the infamous first USC film school class that everyone takes. Even if you're not in the film school at all and you're taking a minor in the film school or you just want to take a class in the film school, everyone has to take 190, which is the Introduction to Cinema class with Dr. Casper. Let's just say that class has a reputation and then I took two more just like it. So the other two classes I took were Introduction to Film and TV and Race, Class, and Gender in American film. So all three of those classes were Critical Studies classes which were in my major track and they all ran effectively the same way. They met once a week and it was a 3 or 4 hour class and it would be 1-2 hours of lecture followed by 2 hours of watching movies. They all had a separate discussion section with the TA and a much smaller group of students. All of the classes had between I would say 200-300 students in each class since they were intro classes, and they also were kind of like a weeding process for the film school. And then the discussion section was a different time at a different day sometimes, and that would have maybe 25 students in it and a TA. Ultimately you were graded by the TA, not by the professor at all. So already I'm spending 11 hours a week in the same building in the film school called Norris Theatre, which completely ironically or coincidentally, or whatever it is, had like a shrine to Frank Sinatra (the singer, not the school) in the front of the auditorium in the entry hall, So it was like a weird kind of roundabout way for me to be back in this Frank Sinatra world.

I also had walked onto the D1 crew team that semester (cue the jokes, Olivia Jade ruined it for us all). I was really, really loving the athletes gym and the athletes Recovery Center and I was still weightlifting on top of all this, and yes I did stop going to class. I would still go to my discussion sections because that's where all the grading happened, but I stopped showing up to the big lectures because honestly, I didn't care and that semester especially, but this actually carried on through my whole time at USC, I was busting my ass for my grades. I had never worked so hard in my life for school and I wasn't even pulling the grades that I was used to. So not only was I working really hard, I also wasn't really seeing the results that I wanted. So I felt like I would spend all this time writing this Critical Studies paper and then I'd get it back, and the TA would disagree with me. And it was like... I just felt so frustrated because I was like "Why does this grad student get to grade me and tell me whether or not this is worth it?"

There were a lot of things that really frustrated me about that program, and I pretty much ended up having a breakdown in my Race, Class, and Gender midterm exam and I decided right then there that I was going to change my major. I knew I needed something more creative but I wasn't really sure what. I had just had a meeting with my advisor that day and she said "Okay, so you're on track, your next class is gonna be History of International Cinema I and History of International Cinema II" and I remember thinking "I have to get out of here as fast as possible, I do not want to take those classes."

So I started planning.

The next semester after that which was my first semester of my sophomore year, I had quit the crew team and I was trying out a bunch of other stuff. At this point I knew I didn't want to try to go for the production track in the film school because weightlifting had taken up so much of my time that I knew I couldn't commit to the amount of time that production has. And I was still working on my required courses, but there were three classes that really stood out to me that semester.

The first one was Design I which was the first class that I took in the art school. I really enjoyed it but I don't think I was very good at it, and I felt like it was still kind of a competitive environment like the film school, so I felt like I was getting warmer but it wasn't quite it.

Another class that I took was called Race, Class, and Gender in American Media, which was actually, despite the name being incredibly close, it was completely different from the previous class that I had taken the semester before. This class was still in School of Cinematic Arts but it was in the Media Arts and Practice track. But basically at the time they would describe that as it's "the major for the job that doesn't exist yet," which now is probably what I'm doing to be honest - it's like digital content creation pretty much. And in this class we learned Photoshop and kind of got my first intro into Adobe programs, but we were still watching movies and this was actually the second of what would be three separate times in my experience at USC that I had to watch Blade Runner for a class. It still kind of bothers me but let's move on.

I was over movies.

I found the concept of the Media Arts and Practice program really intriguing but I still didn't want to be watching movies. And over the years, every time I tell this story everybody's like "yOu diDn'T liKe wAtChiNg mOviEs?" And the answer is no, I felt like I was spending all of my time watching other people's creative work and not putting out any creative work of my own so it really just felt completely useless to me (and also expensive). And this was confirmed to me in one of my required classes actually, we were reading Malcolm X and I remember so clearly the professor said to us "I'm not gonna put this movie on in this class because I think it's a waste of money for you to be watching movie and class time" and I remember sitting in her class and being like "That's it, I'm done with the film program." I was over the snobbery, I didn't want to argue with my peers about what the best movie was, and whether Clockwork Orange was better than Requiem for a Dream Because honestly, I had grown to hate movies. I liked making them but I really didn't like watching them.

So I went to my advisor and I said "I'm gonna transfer to the art school" and she said “Good luck.”

Hysterical, she was wrong, I got in.

By sophomore spring I was a student in the art school and I was so much happier. My classes were down to 25 students at a maximum, my teachers had us calling them by their first names, and for the first time in my life I learned how to draw, which at 19 years old was incredibly rewarding and fulfilling and something that I had always wanted to do and just felt like if I hadn't learned how to draw as a child then I was never gonna learn. And of course that's not the case anybody, can learn how to draw at any age.

So I just was having a blast and my transition into the art school from the film school is funny because the film school has all this funding, and has this beautiful building - multiple beautiful buildings, and all this space, and the art school is like shoved in the bottom of campus and the building is from the 60s and everything's really old and covered in paint. And I got there and I was like "I feel at home, this feels like where I'm supposed to be.” Not that I don't think I don't I deserve all the nice things, but that I just was among my peers much more in that program than I was in the film program.

At this point, I was pissed I hadn't applied to art school to begin with from high school but regardless, I was stoked to be there and when I transferred to Roski which is the School of Art and Design at USC, I promised myself that I would only take classes to the best of my ability that required me to work with my hands. Throughout my life, I've always been really proficient with software and I know that if I spend enough time in a program I can pick it up, so I didn't want to spend my time having other people teach me how to use a program that I could teach myself how to do. But I did want to enjoy the grown-up kindergarten aspects of art school. I wanted to be getting messy, I wanted to be working with my hands, I wanted things to show for what I was making.

At this point, Roski was going through some really turbulent times, there were a lot of layoffs and that was actually when the entire master's program dropped out of the art school because of their frustrations with the professors that they wanted were no longer with the school, things like that. Now they've rebranded as a design focused school and I think a lot of what Roski is known for is the design program, but again I didn't want to study design. I think now I wish I had learned some design principles and pushed that a little bit more, I didn't really realize that design had principles. At the time I kind of just thought it with software and that's it. But I was dead set on getting a fine art degree and that was the direction I went in.

I knew at the end of the day that I was going to get a bachelor's regardless. My film degree would have been a BA so I figured why not just spend my entire BA getting it in art if it's the exact same degree it just has a different set of words at the end of it? Like why bother, especially because I had such an extensive film background from high school that I had spent a significant chunk of time learning film things and so I felt like a lot of what I was learning in the film school was redundant to what I already knew. Roski had a certain amount of required set of courses. You had to take design, you had to take sculpture, you had to take drawing, and you had to take three levels of visual arts and culture, which is just kind of like art history- sort of. But beyond that you're allowed to mix and match as much as you please. I know a lot of art programs really focus you to hone in on one creative outlet and that was something that I really appreciated Roski for not doing because there's so much freedom to explore other mediums. So I ended up really enjoying drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. I also started actually going to class in the art school and my grades were getting better - actually my grades were good I'm pretty sure I got an A in every art class I took for the most part, I think maybe an A- in there somewhere but definitely never a B. One of the reasons was so willing to go to class, and so excited to go to class, was because I felt like my teachers respected me they were accessible. The classes were small, my peers were interesting, they were making interesting work, and so much of the class time was dedicated to studio time so I got to go and make things, whereas in the film school I had to go and sit and watch something that somebody else had made versus going and getting to spend that same amount of time creating something of my own just felt incredible.

I have to say I think the single most beneficial part of my experience at USC was my professors in the art school. I think my professors in general were relatively pretty good Up until I got into the art school and really got serious within that program, I really honestly hated USC. I didn't feel like I fit in and I didn't have any peers that I genuinely liked, but the entire time I felt incredibly inspired by and motivated by my professors and I felt like they really were able to see me and see my creative work and pushed me in the right direction. So going into my senior year, baby, I was ready. My senior year was by far my favorite. I took a step back from weightlifting so I could focus on creating art and I was trying to spend every hour of my life in the studio. And I did! I learned how to cut and weld metal that semester so I started making what I considered to be small-scale public art I ended up graduating with sculpture as my emphasis, but again USC doesn't really have an emphasis unless you kind of self-select it, so I took the most of sculpture, which is why I say it was my emphasis, but I also took a almost equal amount of drawing. I thought that I was going to graduate and I was gonna be making sculpture all the time I was gonna be continuing to make these really big works, and it was going to be great, and without having the critiques, I would still have myself on this deadline and I get these abstract conceptual pieces out, and they would just be great.

Spoiler alert!

That's not what happens after graduation.

The thing is, when you graduate art school you have pretty much no resources and kind of no money. It's also just generally difficult to adjust a life after spending 18 years of your life in school, where every year you know that the next year you're gonna go back to school. I remember feeling a lot of like "What's next? What's gonna happen?" Which was freeing, but also kind of paralyzing at the same time. The best thing you can do after graduation is take the momentum from school that you have of making all that work on a schedule and keep running with it, and keep making work at all costs. So the first thing I did after graduation, as I promised myself, is I enrolled myself into YouTube University. I learned every Adobe program that I could and I tried to apply it as fast as possible. I also would get a monthly delivery of 250 US Postal Service labels which I got for free online (which you can do too, but also support the USPS please) And I would just sit at my desk and draw like 15 to 20 slaps per day.

I picked up a job working at a restaurant and I also started my business around that time, so I was pretty much just working a day job to make some money and creating work still as much as possible in my free time.

It's worth mentioning that I have never, not once been hired, or even really noticed for my USC degree, which was not what we expected especially because so much of what they push when you're applying is like "Trojans Hiring Trojans" is their expression. And I'll be honest, I was not at all prepared for job-land when I graduated. I did meet with a career counsellor at SC after I graduated, but I still felt really unsupported and kind of lost of where I was supposed to go.

Ultimately my biggest regret from art school is graduating with a BA and not pursuing a BFA. To get a BFA I would have had to add another additional semester onto my already four years of school, but I would have gotten a solo show out of it, and that extra letter in my degree, but considering all the switching that I had to do in college, to still be able to finish in four years is quite the accomplishment, so I try not to dwell on it. I do think that art school was a worthy experience for me personally, but that's almost all credited towards my professors. I was embraced and encouraged by my professors and they really pushed me to develop a cohesive body of work, and it was there that I learned how to work hard on my own projects and to not take critique of my work personally, because you are not your work.

I think a lot of my work ethic I can attribute to my experience at USC because I had to work so hard and even though it never amounted to a specific job I still cherish and value my time there.

Of course, art school is not for everyone, but I think if you're set to get a bachelor's degree regardless, you may as well get your hands dirty and enjoy adult kindergarten while you can. In any capacity, spending several years diving into your creative practice and opening your work up for critique can be some of the most rewarding and fun yet challenging things you can do as an artist.

Times are changing though and I don't think that college is the only path, and I don't think that art school is the only path, especially considering the price and how much knowledge there is available for free on the internet. But I think for me personally, I'm really glad that I went and I'm really glad it's done, but DAMN I wish I could go back for one more semester, like ooooh just give me one more!

I always really hated the expression that "college is the best four years of your life." For a number of reasons, honestly. Partially because I only enjoyed two of my years of college and also because I feel like I have higher standards for the rest of my life, like that can't be the best, you know? It can't. It just can't be. There's so much left to live, that can't be the best four years my life, like I just don't believe it. I don't believe it and I refuse to let it be true, frankly. But that being said, it still is a time in my life that I definitely miss.

I hope you enjoyed this story, please give the video a like on YouTube if you enjoyed any part of it, it really helps out the channel and subscribe if you want to see more creative things from me! Let me know in the comments if you're thinking about going to art school, or going to USC or going to Frank Sinatra, or performing arts school, let me know what your story is and what your biggest hesitation is and maybe I can help! Thank you so much for being here, my name is Sophia Mitropoulos, I'll see you next time. Bye!