Its taken me a while to be able to sit down and write a summary about finishing grad school, but here it is in a nutshell: I'm done! :) That convoluted thing you see above was the title, and basically it meant that I was thinking about how technology changes the way we build archives and tell stories. I intend to sit down and write a more thoughtful reflection on the whole process, but for now what I want to do is just show a few pictures.

An MFA at RISD is signified by a few tangible outputs:

• participating in a school-wide show of MFA graduates, [the setup was blogged here]
• giving a 20-minute presentation (followed by 35 minutes of q&a) regarding my work over the last three years, [see below]
• building a website documenting the whole process, [check it out here]
• and writing a book documenting the whole process. [coming soon]

Thesis Presentations
Our individual presentations were spread out over two days, and took place in a gallery on the first floor of our building. There's usually 20-50 people in attendance, including three external critics, the department heads, and each person's three thesis advisors.

Its a public thesis defense in the sense that anyone in the RISD or design community is welcome, but it is closed to family and friends and the general public. It makes sense - an external critic can't exactly tell you the weak spots in your work if your dear Grannie is in the front row, now can he? It sounds intense, but in reality the gathering is fairly informal - people will call out during your talk, or ask you to repeat something - and there is a lot of clapping and cheering at the end.

The atmosphere in my presentation was supportive and engaged, and the discussion afterwards was less about defending my work, and more a jumping off point for debate about the field of graphic design itself.

Here's my setup the night before I presented:

All the presentations are given in a little side room, and then people spill out into the gallery to talk about the work while looking at as many examples as possible. Its a great way of seeing everything you've done amassed in one space, and is quite overwhelming! I've collected photos I took of some of my classmates during their reviews:

I'm still looking for people who took photos of my own presentation, but I have no doubt they exist somewhere. I also have a 5 GB video of the entire thing, which I will compress at some point and put online.

My memory of the whole day is pretty much a blur, but I do think my presentation went really well. Mostly I was just excited to be finished! At the end of the day, I walked away with three copies of the first page of my thesis book (the only part of my thesis book that actually existed at that point), each signed by the external critics, the department heads, my thesis advisors, and my writing coach:

At which point we went off to the Red Fez to celebrate! :)