James Franco - Should I Go To Grad School? lyrics

Graduate schools. I've been to a few. They're funny. Each one is different, obviously. Most of the programs I went to were MFAs. I went for fiction—twice—I went for film, I went for poetry, and I went for art. I went because I had spent years as a professional actor and as a mature student of everything else; I wanted to treat my other interests with as much seriousness as I did my acting. Since at one point I had been a mature actor who worked hard and became a professional, I thought I could do the same thing with other fields. Here are a few observations I've made over the course of six years of grad school at six different programs. With regard to fiction programs, the first thing to consider is that most of the students (if not on scholarship) are paying anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a year to learn a profession that isn't going to pay off soon, even if they do get a book deal right after school. The second thing to consider is that writing is a solitary activity, so you shouldn't expect much collaboration with your peers. After cla**es, students go home and write stories so they can bring them to cla** to be workshopped. While workshops get criticized a lot, they do allow one's writing to be read critically and talked about. Even if the feedback is worthless, a writer's work changes if the writer knows that it is going to be read. Film programs, on the other hand, are collaborative: All students work on each other's films. Everyone rotates roles: In one production you're the director, in another you're the cinematographer, in another you're the boom operator. This makes each person invested in his or her cla**mates' work, unlike in writing programs, where the writer stands alone. In those programs, cla**mates give each other what is ostensibly constructive criticism, but the situation is still basically one against all. I'm not saying that writing students are weird, but maybe I am. Art school is different. It's more like film school. There is more collaboration in art school than in writing programs, though the projects are less structured. It's harder for people to criticize each other along conventional lines because the art world has shattered into so many different kinds of practices. Because writing and narrative film programs usually teach traditional approaches, those programs have firmer criteria for what is “working” and what isn't. All my teachers have been great. In every program, but especially in the writing programs. There were a few crazy teachers, but they weren't so bad, either. The great thing about going to a writing program is that most writers teach to supplement their income. So the best authors are usually also teachers. And having Gary Shteyngart or Ben Marcus or Michael Cunningham or Tony Hoagland or Robert Boswell or Amy Hempel or David Shields or James Wood or Jonathan Lethem as a teacher is like acting in a film directed by Gus Van Sant or Danny Boyle or Sam Raimi or Harmony Korine. In general, if you are in a program that is funded, like a PhD program, everyone is more pleasant. Students don't worry about money in the same way that MA students do, and they know that they're superstars in their subject because they have been chosen over many others and are being supported by the school. If anything, the best thing about graduate school is that it's a place where the things you consider sacred are also considered sacred by the people around you. There is a lot of love and hate in graduate programs, but at least I've gotten to be with people who speak my language.