Written by Kimberly Harper-Colucci. Graphic by Ananya Panchal.
There is a moment that happens somewhere between starting and submitting. The brief is still open on your screen, the rubric hasn’t changed, but something in the work has shifted. Suddenly, you’re not making it for the grade anymore.
You’re making it because you have to.
Every SCAD student knows the overwhelming feeling of constant output. Project after project, deadline after deadline, the rhythm of create and submit becomes its own kind of muscle memory. Somewhere inside that rhythm, for some students, something else happens. The work stops performing and starts telling the truth. The question is when and what it costs to get there.
My own shift didn’t happen in the major I started in.
I came to SCAD already holding a marketing degree, fluent in advertising and branding. That path made sense on paper. It came easily. Easy was exactly the problem.
The first semester of photography changed everything. Something woke up in me from behind the lens that I didn’t know was asleep. By the time we transitioned from Lomography cameras to infrared digital work, I was excited every morning. Advertising classes couldn’t touch that feeling. I switched my major to photography, added art direction as a minor, and never looked back.
Switching wasn’t the hard part. Professor D.L. Simmons was the one who named what I was still doing wrong. I was making aesthetically clean work: safe and easy to look at. He saw right through it.
“Create something that costs you something,” he told me. “Ask yourself what you want to say, and say something with meaning.”
That question changed how I work. It changed what I’m willing to risk. As a middle-aged woman building a photography career, the road is not an easy one, but the perspective I bring is mine. You don’t get one without the other.
Jesse Harless is a graduate student completing three programs simultaneously — MFA Illustration, an MA in Interactive Technologies and Game Management (ITGM), and MFA Photography. He came into this conversation the same way he approaches his work: from multiple angles at once. Across three disciplines, he has felt the difference between mediums that invite risk and those that punish it.
In illustration, the structure was academic and tight. Experimentation wasn’t always promoted, and risks could affect the grade. Game design — his ITGM focus — carried its own specific technical weight, where modeling, poly count, UVs, texturing, and rendering were all requirements that had to be met before creative vision could even enter the conversation. Miss any of them, and the grade suffers, regardless of what you were trying to say.
Photography was different.
For one project, Harless built clay environments by hand. He sculpted textures, set Philips Hue lights for atmosphere, and added fog. Then, he placed his children inside each environment and made them the focal point.
“They are the focal point of my life,” he said.
He knew the work had shifted while it was still happening. The medium gave him room that his other disciplines hadn’t. Photography encouraged experimentation. It asked him to try something that hadn’t been done before.
Harless also knows what it feels like to edit yourself for the room. He used to make military art for illustration classes. The critiques felt empty. Professors didn’t always have language for it. Students didn’t connect. So, he moved back toward fantasy and science fiction–safer subjects academically, even if they were less personal.
“I went back to making more traditional work,” he says. “Those subjects felt safer academically, even though they were less personal to me.”
The clay environments happened when he stopped playing safe. Sculpted textures, colored light, fog, and his kids were at the center of every frame. The work cost him something. That’s how he knew it was real.
Hallie George knew before the project even started.
The advertising and branding student, who minors in applied AI, had already read the rubric. She had the idea two or three weeks before the class caught up to it. When the UX project launched, she didn’t wait.
“I remember thinking, wait, this is actually a really good idea,” she said. “From that moment, I already knew I was gonna take it further than just the assignment.”
She stopped sleeping and kept working. She started to think not just about how the design looked, but how it would function. She tested ideas, coded, and pushed into the technical side because that’s where she lives. When group members didn’t show up, she did the work herself. She wasn’t protecting her grade. She was protecting the idea.
George is an advertising and branding student, which means she spends a lot of time inside other people’s briefs, other people’s brands, and other people’s problems–presentation decks, rebrands, audience analysis. The work is disciplined, and it is real, but it doesn’t always leave room for you.
She figured out how to make room anyway.
“It’s not really my project until I add something that feels like me in it,” she says. “Otherwise, it just feels like I’m doing work for no reason.”
That UX project is still alive outside of class. She’s still building it. The assignment ended. The work didn’t.
Three students with three majors and three different moments of arrival.
One came early, two or three weeks before the brief was even handed out. One came in the middle and was recognized in real time while the clay was still being shaped and the lights were being adjusted. One came from being called out by a professor who saw safe work and pushed for something true.
The common thread is not talent. It’s not technical skill or the right major or the perfect assignment. It’s the moment a student stops asking what the rubric wants and starts asking what they have to say.
D.L. Simmons put it plainly. Create something that costs you something.
At SCAD, somewhere between the deadlines and the decks and the discipline of output, some students figure out what that means. The ones who do, don’t forget it.
Kimberly Harper-Colucci is a BFA Photography student with a minor in art direction at SCAD, graduating in 2027.
