Jennifer Glaser (MFAD ’11), the current editor of Crit: The School of Visual Arts Graduate Design Blog, offers the first post of the Fall 2010 semester. Here’s an excerpt:

“Re-examining after the first year last spring, Steven Heller asked me to talk in his office.

“This might be like taking coals to Newcastle,” he began. Then he told me that the New York Times was looking for summer interns and asked if I’d like him to recommend me for the program.

I paused for a second, just a second and told him no, but thank you.

In that second, I realized that the MFA Design program at SVA had changed me. I had come to graphic design as a refugee from the neighboring field of journalism. I have a degree in political science and journalism, and I’d spent six years at a major daily newspaper in Omaha, Nebraska, designing section covers and losing quite a lot of the idealism that had come with my journalism degree.

But in that second in Steve’s office, I could hear echoes of my 22-year-old self. To that woman, this opportunity would have been a pie-in-the-sky opportunity that would have been impossible to pass up. . .

But that woman didn’t get that opportunity. Instead, I stayed at the Omaha World-Herald for six years until I could design the local cover in my sleep (column one for columnist, five columns at top for lead story, four-column stand alone art, column six for second-most-important story) and I was feeling such a professional inertia that I quit my job to go back to school.”

Read more here.