Today I officially left NUCA, and I can’t tell you how good that feels.

I may have mentioned that I was thinking of leaving the art school, and that it was no real hidden fact that I disliked NUCA, partly down to everything else that has making me feel low, but I’ve never explained in full what made me finally decide to leave. So be prepared for possibly the longest thing I’ve ever written on here, but it will probably do me good to try and explain it as clearly as I possibly can.

Ultimately, I am the one paying to attend NUCA. It is not compulsory I am there, nor is it anyone’s choice but mine. I control if I am there or not, but I was not happy there, and I am certain I wasn’t getting anything beneficial out of it. I mean, of course, I’m learning, but I don’t think I was learning anything that was particularly beneficial to me or what I wanted to do. I am positive that amongst my peers, each one of us wanted different things out of the course, and wanted to take different routes within photography, but I was not being taught to be the kind of photographer I wanted to be, or the photos I wanted to take.

I’m not awful at photography, and there was a time when I enjoyed it, because I chose to do it as a degree course, and I had fun working the concepts and editing photos, and I couldn’t have been too bad at taking photos either because I wouldn’t have been accepted at NUCA otherwise. I was extremely motivated – in sixth form I wrote my 5,000 word essay in 2 hours because I was so into what I was doing with my creative processes, but slowly my motivation dropped whilst being at the art school.

I feel like what I’m being “taught” in classes is not only pointless, but is all stuff we could figure out ourselves anyway. Hand on my heart; I don’t feel as if I’ve learnt a single thing since being there. I am self taught in all the photo-editing programs I use, using my camera, doing my own research, retouching etc., and really does being told to go out and take photos of Norwich over and over constitute as being taught anything? If I wanted to go out and take photos of Norwich, I’m certain I could go out and do that off my own back. With my course, I feel there’s no room for creativity. You’re given an assignment, such as “take photos of Norwich for a brochure/postcard/interactive CD rom (which, by the way are obsolete in terms of modern media)”, a project which there is little to no scope for creativity or skill – these photos are to be informative, not ‘fancy’, for want of a better expression. We go and do them, and then they critique them along with my other classmates, and then give another assignment which is equally as constricting in terms of creativity.  Our tutor’s can’t literally teach us to become better photographers, all they can do is tell us how we can take better photos next time round, and being frank, I can look at my own images and critique them and think about what I could do to improve them next time around. Do I really need to pay just over £6,000 a year for this?

Of course, I acknowledge that my tutors knowledge and critique are helpful to the projects I am doing, but the projects themselves are not beneficial to me or the photographer I wanted to be, which means really that the tutors are not very helpful to me, as a photographer. If I graduated from NUCA today, I could look back and say “I still am no further in understanding or knowing more that would have helped me, career wise.”, and being two thirds into my degree, I don’t think that is going to change.

Aside from that, I don’t feel comfortable at NUCA. I have been there for almost 2 years now, and I still feel like I don’t belong. I had two very good friends there, but they have since left due to not liking NUCA also. I don’t particularly love my classmates, I only know a handful of people at the school and I can only call them acquaintances. If anything, I have a few enemies, thanks to the childish antics of one ex-student, making my 2nd year in critiques awkward. That doesn’t make for an inviting atmosphere. I don’t feel comfortable amongst my peers, so I don’t feel comfortable in my school, and I don’t feel comfortable in my class. Without sounding offensive or odd, I am not like anyone there, and I have not seen anybody there who I feel I could get on with at more than an acquaintance level. The amount of work I get in my classes, juggled with the travelling I do to get there (meaning 6:30am starts and I often go to bed around 2:30am to get work done for the next day) means I am left feeling exhausted and overworked, with no motivation to do the work I have. This leads me to procrastinate, so I can actually have a bit of a life and do what I want to do without it being consumed entirely by NUCA that is making me miserable, which eventually leads to more stress, because I have a lot of work piled up. I’ve tried for the past 6 months to try and ‘suck it up’, but there’s only so much faking you can do before you can accept that no matter how hard you try, you are not going to be happy here. Being here has sucked all the enthusiasm I had for photography, and no longer want to do this for a career. I have been thinking this for a while now.

I kind of feel like that not only am I wasting money, but I am also wasting time. Time that could be spent doing other things that make me happy. I am young enough to cut my losses and start again, career wise. But most importantly, I can then give myself the time needed to focus on and fix the other aspects in my life that are making me unhappy. The only thing I would regret more than dropping out and wondering if I made a bad decision is staying at NUCA and realising next year that I completely wasted all that time, energy and money putting myself through so much stress, anxiety and unhappiness to the point that it made me physically sick and never wanting to get out of bed.

At this point, I’m not even sure if a BA degree will make me any more successful. Realistically, if I still wanted to pursue a career in photography, I would need more than just a degree, I would also need a good portfolio. However, I don’t think I could have a good portfolio based on the fact I haven’t advanced at all. At this point I should say that I gave up on the idea of being a photographer in the summer of my first year at NUCA, but instead I thought I could improve on my hobby and also gain a degree out of it, which is what I was more interested in getting than the course itself. I wanted something to outshine just about average grades and little work experience. I felt that if I had a degree, it would excuse a lot of that, and I could say that I have achieved something. I’m not even sure if I wanted to go to a university, not completely. We had lectures in sixth form from guest speakers from other universities telling us how great university was, and it made sense to go and further my education. I did it all without really thinking about it. I applied, I got in, I started going. I never stopped to think about if it was what I wanted. Now I think I could progress more and feel more of a sense of achievement not being in school.

I no longer take photos in my spare time; there is too much pressure and grief associated with it, because NUCA is sapping all the enthusiasm from me. It’s sad to think about that when I do have free time, I no longer want to do something I once enjoyed. I feel this way about a lot of things but I know that my passion for photography was definitely flattened by the art school.

I don’t think this is an issue of changing my degree, if I could rewind the past two years, I probably would have picked a different university and course, but I’ve since learnt that it’s just not a case of changing degree, I genuinely feel that university just isn’t for me.

Most importantly, I just want to be happy, and right now I think that even if I got a small part time job so that I’m able to pay bills and keep and figure out what it is will make me happy, will make me feel a thousand times better than I would being at university. Those that I have spoken to about leaving have been very supportive towards me and I feel that there would be no pressure of disappointment from these people, which is a relief as it had worried me when I first started thinking about leaving. I wouldn’t say I regretted going, I made a really good friend there and there is a small feeling of satisfaction knowing I was smart enough to get into a dedicated art university, and I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about myself by being there, but perhaps I don’t need to be there as much as I thought I did.

University isn’t for everyone, especially an art university, but I fail to see the point of going anymore when I’ve come to hate what I’m studying. I see no point in me wasting time, money that could be better spent and fighting mountains of anxiety, sadness, stress and exhaustion every day just for a diploma, because that’s all I’m really doing it for. As nice as it would be to have a degree, I just feel physically and mentally exhausted and I don’t think I can give any more time to NUCA. The cons outweigh the pros.

So long NUCA, and thanks for all the debt.

♥: Relieved
♪: !!! – There’s No Fucking Rules, Dude