Will from Florida - M.F.A. Media Arts

Hello, my name is Will Roberts.  I'm from Miami, Florida and I'm an M.F.A. student in Media Arts.  When choosing a place for my master's degree, I thought SIU was a great fit.

It's a cross-discipline program, and that's the kind of area that I like to go into--different aspects of art, media and things like that.  So it fit well for me and I've learned from different people in the program that do different forms of media than me, so I think it's a perfect fit for me.

I was a sound guy, I did a lot of things with sound for documentaries and movies, but after continuing on through the program, it's a broad range of things that we are exposed to.  I got into 3D animation, and now I'm 3D animation and sound guy.

Before coming to grad school, I shot a documentary in Liberia, West Africa.  It was on an orphanage there, and I got to know 10-12 boys from the orphanage.

Now my thesis project is a fantasy-type animation that is based on true stories from the Liberian Civil War.  Their stories and my  stories kind of combine together.  It's going to be special.

One of my favorite classes that I've taken thus far was Cade Bursell's "Shawnee Forest" class.  The "Shawnee Forest" class was basically us going out in to the forest and making art.  Growing up, I wasn't exposed to the forest, nature and stuff like that.

Coming from Miami--big city, concrete, inner city--that type of thing.  It was just like this rush of creativity came out just being exposed to all this nature.

I participated in this project called the Sketchbook Project. It was a collaborative project with over 100 different artists that traveled around to 20 different cities in the U.S. Through that, I got a lot of exposure and one month I was a featured artist on the web site, I thought that was pretty cool.

After grad school, I plan to work in the industry, and later on be a teacher, if not when I get out of grad school, I can maybe teach.  That's what grad school allows me to do, with my M.F.A. I can teach at the college level with the experience that I get from my TA and RA-ships it prepares us to be a teacher, or be an instructor or be a technical director for industry.

With anyone that's pursuing their M.F.A.,  SIU is a great school to do that.  It's a cross-discipline program.  Just like me, I came in as an audio guy and I'm leaving as something different, something else.