Senior Stories: Fridge-Worthy Work

Less than a month until I graduate.

Holy. Shit. (sry mom)

Four years flew by. It’s cliché, but it really did. It feels like I blinked and four years vanished. Especially this last school year. My last two semesters have blurred into one giant semester.

Mid-May, I will walk across a stage, receive a very expensive piece of paper, and become an official alumna from the University of Texas at Austin (I’ll be a “Texas Ex”).

Now I’m looking back on this semester with a specific story that I want to share. This will be part of a series that I’m calling “Senior Stories.” (I know, realll creative.) This story is about self-confidence, belief in oneself, first days of school, etc etc etc.

It goes something like this**:

Setting: It’s the first day of class and my second class of the day.

We’re given this piece of paper and told to draw a portrait of the person who was closest to us. Of course, I knew no one. So on top of drawing a stranger, we were only given one minute to draw this portrait. After the minute was up, our professor asked us how we felt about our drawing. Nonverbals said that we were all a little bit embarrassed; no one wanted to share their drawing. He told us that it always results the same way when he does this exercise in his classes.

He then goes on to tell us a story about his five-year-old niece and how she drew a portrait of our professor. The difference between us college students and his niece was this: she was extremely proud of her drawing. So proud that she believed that it deserved to be on the fridge. He segued into telling us that that’s how proud we should be of our work. That’s how we should feel: we should believe that our work is fridge-worthy.

This is a rare feeling. I know this and you know this (yes?).
But if we’re not producing fridge-worthy work,
if we don’t believe we can produce fridge-worthy work,
we are most definitely selling ourselves short.
We have to ask, who will think it’s fridge-worthy if we don’t?

To tie this in with Pixar (because I think it’s just so damn fitting), I wanted to share with you guys that I did some investigating. And I was told that while I did stand out as a candidate, my execution was not flawless. That hurt. Because to me I heard, “it wasn’t good enough, that I was not good enough.” But I’m going to try [really hard] and choose to think about it in a different way. My Pixar campaign was good despite the flaws because I put my whole heart into it.

It is fridge-worthy.

Your turn. Did you create something fridge-worthy?

**I don’t really remember how this story panned out exactly, but I tried. -shrug- Senior year.