Today, I will tell you a fairy-tale. Well, actually, I’ll tell you about my most recent exams, the school which was my priority and made me worried about — The Munich University of Applied Sciences.
The examinations were held on July 7 and 8, which, by the standards of the rest of Germany, is quite late: if you look at my schedule, the rest of the deadlines were distributed from January to May. A huge amount of people were admitted to the exam: there were about 70 of examinees (and just 20–25 places in the end), but this was said to be caused by the fact that there were over 700 people who submitted their portfolios.
I took my time to compose the portfolio carefully keeping in mind all of my Leipzig lessons about the need to have a lot of hand-made works, collages and drawings. This portfolio is my favorite one, and I cherish the hope to make an exhibition based on it. Right at home: in general, after the works were submitted, no one needed them, but for me they meant a year of preparation, time spending, searching for subjects and themes.
When I had my first internship, my companion intern was Nina — a smiling and cool girl who told me about her enrolling (not successful at her first attempt, which scared me a lot), the school magazine, tasks and exams. From her, I learned what they study, what sort of a professors teach there; I also had a look at how good she performed exactly those tasks that I felt weak at.
The Letter of Invitation to the Exams took me unsettled, completely undecided and inflated due to delays in communication. I got the letter within those fifteen minutes which I took to go buy some breakfast biscuits, I received it and the sun came out.
I would call the first day a nightmare. I hated everything – the tasks, the excessive number of people, the room layout, the inability to work on the tasks at my own pace, those over-long lunch breaks. I was totally not in the mood to take pictures; however, I can list them.
We started with drawing postcard-sized drafts of a campaign revealing the inconsistency of E‑Zigaretten. These are long (like magic wands) tubes filled with so-called shisha – a nicotine-free smoking mixture, but in fact with some incredible acid, which can be smoked in Germany by kids aged 13 and older. This was the story topic.
As a tiny remark, I shall say that it seems to me that such tasks are given not because of the fact that the Commission did not have time to think about a task that would amuse the applicants, but in order to see how they react to banal and trite topics. Personally, I felt sick and wished to go out for a smoke. So, during the first hour of the two hours given, I was just staring at the white sheet, recollecting the movie “Thank You for Smoking”, and cursing the whole world. In the end, I had 9 not the most horrible sketches about a shisha sales-stand made of a school bus, a lunch box including two cigarettes for breakfast and lunch, and other artistic delights. As a matter of fact, this is a great brain stimulating tool, and I would advise everyone to set such banal tasks and look for solutions.
After this and an endless lunch break, Professor of typography – a small puny Asian guy – gave us a task to come up with three capital letters. Three capital letters. It sounded like the Universe. However, there is nothing more abstract than just letters. Each one was to be placed on an A-4 sheet of paper, and then we had to create a 13x25 cm book cover using these letters. To tell you the truth, it turned out to be hard for me. The biggest danger of this task was hidden in these beautiful letters: their color, spikiness, decorations and so on. Font development is a job for those with strong spirits, and checking if the applicants could build a letter not adding a crown to its junction point was a great move. No limits, no forms, only freedom which scares people most.
The last task and the most failed for and by me task was the one to create a scheme for tying shoelaces. It sounded so deceptively simple, that I felt lifted in spirits, but all was in vain – drawing lace nodes and connection points so that the scheme could be understood by someone who had never used laces was just like hell. Try to google shoelace tying schemes and you will understand why I did not use any prompts. There is not a single picture left showing how I was trying to introduce the trend of tying sailor’s knots instead of all known butterflies.
If you want to learn to draw clear graphics, take the most terribly banal scenes from real life and try to explain them to an imaginary person who has never seen or experienced them. How to iron with an iron; how to ride a bike; how a washing machine washes cloths. We are so accustomed to the language of symbols and instructions that we have no idea how difficult it is to create such a language for each new device or a mechanism invented.
We started the second day with rabbits! This is not a joke, but was intended to be a joke, because the task was to come up with humorous answers concerning how the United Nations Climate Change Conference rolled on. My options were “Conduct a workshop involving stones as experts on the topic “We do not need any oxygen; “Ask grandparents, because they always know better;” and “Show the Earth that we are also able to show off.”
Again, it should be noted that there were much more tasks aimed at the applicants’ expressing themselves in German and the knowledge of the language in comparison with other schools, this requires one to have the guts and fast Internet to use a dictionary.
After this, we were given the second in the list of the most banal tasks – draw attention to reading. Here I shall make a small note – I had already this task once at the examination in Weißensee, and I can say with full responsibility that, if you have the opportunity to use your old and proven ideas at new exams – do it without a shadow of doubt. It will save you time, improve your results and give you some confidence. Therefore, my Berlin series was immediately implemented.
The next task was the one to check our ability to describe and analyze. We were given four images to which we had to write whatever came to our mind that could help classify these images. I tried to not only give an overall description of the image, whether it was a sculpture, a drawing or a painting, but give some info on the presence of the author, technique, viewers’ impression, composition, dynamics, and other aspects of the image as well.
The last task was to illustrate the text of a song about a spaceship, ambition and importance of optimism in dealing with everyday troubles. Here I did not think long and decided to replace the lack of beautiful metaphors with a good looking visual solution.
Again, in practice, one should not try to be the smartest, but needs to try to be the most organic, do what he or she is best at, try different styles in sketches, and show interest in the surrounding world at the interview. To begin your study, you do not need to be a genius; you need to be a curious researcher.
All this was followed by two weeks of agonizing and waiting, and a personal congratulation on my enrollment. In my next post, I will describe the rest of the schools and make a small summary, but right now I just want to say – turn every test to a celebration, and you will succeed.
