One thing that changed when I got back to school after Thanksgiving Break, was that I forgot to "play dumb" for a while. It wasn't until entering finals two weeks later that it dawned on me that I had totally forgotten to scale back on the "know it all" approach to things, primarily in class. Obviously that can't be reversed, but I still was conscious to temper that reflex for the rest of my freshman year. By then, everyone important had pretty much figured it out, so there wasn't much point in hiding it. Since academics weren't highly valued there, I don't think people were too intimidated by my capacity in that regard, at least not the way they were in High School. Regardless, it had the desired effect, and intelligence was not the only thing people associated with my identity.
The second semester I got to chose my own classes, and jumped right into the Multimedia track, opting to defer many of my general education classes, because I was in a hurry to get involved in projects I was more interested in. The most significant was the 'Surround Video" class, which was an experiment dreamed up by a music teacher, inspired by surround sound. The task was to create an immersive experience that spanned multiple discontinuous screens. It took me a while to wrap my engineering mind around the discontinuous aspect, but once I did, I took a fairly technical approach to it. My group did a piece about the technology involved in making that work, which was meant to introduce the projects from the other groups in the class. Since none of the other groups in the class ended up being technically capable of completing the assignment, ours was the only completed project, and appeared very self serving and inward focused in its content. But it was an innovative marvel of precise planning and execution, both in how we did it and the idea behind it. The end product was an installation where two people wandered between various screens, altering the content on them, and explaining how we made the system they were seeing. It was hundreds of hours of work for a one credit class, but established my key role in the technology side of the multimedia department. It was also the first time I worked with “Dan” who was just starting out as a professor at the University, after being an Imagineer at Disney, among other things. He was the head of the department by the time I graduated, and I worked closely with him to advance the program and our facilities.
I also took a Digital Music class, since music is something I have little understanding of. Unfortunately the operative word was digital, which I was already very familiar with, and the music part was presupposed. The rest of my classes that semester were insignificant, besides the second half of HumTut. That group had bonded by then, after countless hours of work, and many field trips and outside activities. We ended up making T-shirts at the end of the year, to commemorate the experience. I helped in that process, and still have mine. I ended up getting a B+ for the 2nd half, which broke a 5 year streak of straight A’s. I hadn't even been consciously trying to maintain that in college, but certain habits are hard to break. It was probably good to break that streak, to take the remove the pressure that naturally builds up in that situation. I only ended up getting 3 or 4 B's in college, but that is fine. Ironically my college grades have had zero effect on my life since then. They probably only would have mattered if I had gone to grad school, and even that is debatable.
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