My Residents Drew All Over My Walls and I Didn’t Get Fired

I’m a creative who’s attended STEM-focused schools my whole life, which means a few things:

1. I’ve learned to value data and crayons.
2. Up until a few years ago, I thought there was something wrong with me. Growing up, I thought I was a black sheep. Now I know I’m just good at running through life with unorthodox habits.

My last year of undergrad has me in that phase. You know, that phase. When you’re angsty and confused and questioning everything, wondering what your fucking legacy is. Legacy? I’m 21 years old… my legacy could be having too many drinks at Johnny V’s, but nah. It’s March 2016 and I’m a filthy millennial looking to make a change beyond dingy bar walls.

Here’s my proposed change: before I leave UCSD, I’d like to know I’ve left at least a few people valuing creative thought more.

I define creativity as novel thinking: it’s not just picking up a paintbrush and making something that looks kinda like an apple and an orange. It’s a lifestyle — it’s you challenging yourself to think differently and coming up with something extraordinary about the ordinary. In these past four years, I’ve learned I’m more than the lines of code I write — I’m the struggles I’ve overcome and the discomfort I’ve learned from. I’m creative.

I’m also a Resident Assistant who wants to teach this to 90 students, most of whom are not first years (so they aren’t fooled by balloon animals and free pizza). I questioned how I was going to share my values for months — then one night at 3am I got it. What if I plaster my entire house in butcher paper then come up with prompts for them? Crazy, but I’ve learned to love my crazy.

Over the next two months, I brainstormed activities to teach my residents to love creative thinking (or at the least, value it as a destresser). This included recreating song lyrics with emoji, word association games, and drawing pictures of people in the room without looking at your paper or lifting your pen. (You can read the full details here.)

A few things I learned from the event:

1. Drawing is uncomfortable, but you learn from discomfort. I got complaints that it was intimidating to draw in front of others. At first I felt bad, but I remembered this was part of the lesson: to trust the process. No matter how scary it can be, you learn from your fear. I mitigated this fear by having people draw with their nondominant hands and experiment with various mediums — art isn’t about being accurate.
2. Relate to people, and they’ll listen to your message. As an aspiring advertiser, this part comes naturally to me but I’m nevertheless always surprised by how much it helps. I suspect part of the reason my residents came is that I never explained how I was going to get away with letting them draw over my house. In other words, I appealed to their curiosity and got them talking. Pop culture references and promises of free food were the next step to their hearts. A lil Lil Jon never hurt nobody.
3. Creativity is a long-term relationship. This one event is definitely not enough to really show my residents what creativity is. There’s so much more I’d love to dialogue about: art with a message, how you can practice self-love through self-expression, when creativity solves your med school problems AND your relationship problems. I’m working on my next project to get my campus to understand this better, because creativity isn’t a habit, it’s my lifestyle.

It’s only been a few months since I’ve truly taken agency of my creative identity; it’s still scary for me to self-identify as a creative. What’s terrifying and exhilarating about this is there aren’t right answers in creativity. There are just new avenues.

These avenues keep me wide awake, jaw dropped over even the mundane — through creativity, I’ve refreshed the old and found ways to rethink everything.

My one hope is I can guide others to find value and challenges in the unorthodox as much as I’ve been empowered to do so.