Biography: A.R. Harter.
When I finished high school in June, 2002, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. I was planning to go off to college in the fall, but I was entering as Undeclared. As it happened, my indecisiveness didn’t really matter at the time, as I was diagnosed with lymphoblastic lymphoma the week of that I gradutated. Rather than attending college that fall, I instead began a two year treatment regime at UCLA Medical Center. I responded well to chemotherapy, and, after taking a year off, I began college in fall of 2003 at UCLA (not my college of choice, but convenient, since it was close to home and also where I was going for treatment), again Undeclared.
I finished my bachelor’s and graduated with honors from UCLA in winter, 2008, having majored in History (with a concentration on the Middle Ages and Renaissance) and minored in English. I originally intended to go on to complete a Master’s and doctorate in History, but when I failed to get into a Latin post-baccalaureate program I had planned on entering, I was a bit adrift. I began working full time at the small educational retail/publishing company I'd been working at part-time since 2001, switching from the editorial department to the art department.
In winter of 2009 I enrolled in an online Master’s of Library and Information Science program at California State University San José, however I did not flourish in the online learning platform the way I had in more traditional programs, and I left after two terms. Remembering how, while in the MLIS program, I would frequently anticipate Monday morning because it would mean I’d get to go back to formating books and catalogues, designing book covers and posters, coding Web sites, etc., I decided to try my hand at acquiring a degree in graphic design.
Despite having worked in the publishing industry for, at the time, a little over eight years, the extent of my formal graphic design training was limited to a HTML-coding class taken through ROP in 2000, and an introductory class in InDesign at Santa Monica College in 2008. I had an extensive knowledge of Photoshop, InDesign, HTML, and a strong foundational knowledge in Illustrator, Acrobat, and Quark, but the majority of this knowledge was gained through trial-and-error, or learned on the job. I knew a lot of particulars, but was missing many of the fundamentals. Having washed my hands of MLIS, I began looking into Master’s programs in Graphic Design. At which point I hit yet another snag.
It seems that the majority of M.A. programs out there require that applicants have their B.A. in Graphic Design or at least a related field (e.g., “Art”). History clearly not being a related field, a M.A. was out of the question... unless I slapped together a really strong portfolio. Unfortunately, most of the projects I was completing for work at that time didn’t allow me to truly showcase the versatility of my design skills. So it is that, for now, at least, I’ve put all plans of an advanced degree on the backburner while I complete a certificate of achievement in Graphic Design at Santa Monica College, where the classes allow me to fill in the gaps in my design training, and the assignments provide a useful way of filling out my portfolio.