Hacker News Reader

Comment by amirmc | Hacker News Reader

> "I didn't realize how thick of a skin I have due to my arts background."

Unfortunately, I think this says more about the programmers today and the culture they expect, rather than your resilience.

(that's not meant to imply that you're not resilient, by the way).

View on HN

Don't underestimate the brutality of art school critiques. Most fields wouldn't tolerate it, not just programming.

Freshman year, at least one person would run out of each class crying during critique. First year is all about destroying everything you know about art and yourself so that you can be rebuilt, it's soul crushing but necessary to push people outside their comfort zone.

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.

Things can get brutal in art school indeed! I think that a big part of this (and its one of the parts that would be less tolerated in say, and engineering school) is that there can at times be a significant political dimension to the criticism. That is to say that the critiques are nominally focused on such and such a technique or choice of subject matter, but are actually about aligning oneself with a faction advocating the trend du jour or that one professor who hates anything X. Having said that, this sort of stuff certainly happens in business settings as well, which supports GGPs point.

True. I saw a few put to tears. A small handful washed out, too. 70-80 hour weeks of work, and harsh realities. It's not as easy as some think, depending on the school and program selected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com