November 14, 2001

Campus Day paints picture of college

NMC Art Department offers event for high school students

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       While meticulously scratching off ink from her paper to make an intricate, bamboo design, Theresa Dezelski mulled her future.
      A senior at Traverse City West High School, Dezelski was at Northwestern Michigan College Friday afternoon for the school's twice yearly High School Art Campus Day. With 34 other students from around the state, she was checking out the art offerings at NMC and contemplating whether they would fit in her college and career plans.
      "This is a good place to start," said Dezelski, who attended with three others from West High School. "I am hoping to go to Chicago and study pottery at the Chicago Institute of Art. I want to get my prerequisites out of the way here."
      While West High School senior Laura Boucher plans a career in business, she came to the Campus Day to learn more about pursuing her love of art, too.
      "This day is helpful because I don't know how much I'll be able to work art into my program when I'm studying business," Boucher said. "I hope to work in visual art, maybe in advertising."
      Reaching students like Dezelski and Boucher is just what the Campus Day is designed to do.
      Hosted by the Art Department, students could choose between a morning of monoprinting or computer graphics. After lunch in the college's cafeteria, the group toured the Dennos Museum and then returned to the Art Department for a question and answer session.
      Members of the Northwestern Michigan College Art Department faculty guided students step-by-step through the morning's work sessions. The individual attention and college-level projects gave students a taste of a college art course, complete with finished work to take home.
      Instructor Jill Hinds worked with students on a computer graphics project. First the students took digital pictures of themselves, either portraits or more informal shots around the Humanities building. Students then used these images to create postcards of themselves, incorporating them into either snowboarding or a beach motif.
      "We really want to give them a chance to visit the Art Department and see what we have," Hinds said. "It's fun for us because we get to address the work at a little bit different level of student, get them excited about working on art at the college level."
      Hinds said that after a few years of High School Art Campus Days, she does see some familiar faces return for college classes.
      "Every year we get a couple of students who come in who attended the campus day," she said. "We come in and look at the pictures they made, we save them."
      The campus day attracted students from around the region, including Leland, Mancelona, Roscommon and Kingsley. In addition, a group of a dozen students made the trek north from Allen Park High School near Detroit to see what NMC has to offer. Accompanied by two of the school's art teachers plus two parents, the students even stayed overnight in the college's dorms.
      For at least one Allen Park High School student, the chance to visit NMC may influence her college choice.
      "I am thinking about coming up here," said Lindsey Andres, a 12th grade student at Allen Park High School who plans to pursue a career in art. "I never even heard of this place until my teacher told us about this day. Staying in the dorms was pretty cool."
      The Art Department began holding Campus Days five years ago with two goals in mind: encouraging students to come to NMC and spread the word about art education in general.
      "It is a little bit of recruitment and also a way to reach out to the community, too, and offer students things they don't get at their high school," said Doug Domine, Art Department chair at Northwestern Michigan College. "It is another way to interact with the schools because we do have a lot of contact with them."