Meet Rebecca Tran, 21, a junior visualization major who turned her passion for art into something she could do for the rest of her life. Getting her start in Fort Worth with drawing anime as a hobby, Rebecca decided to change her major to visualization. However, Rebecca didn’t always know she wanted to be a visualization major, she was originally an engineering major. “I had to get out, I hated my life.” She recalls, giggling.
Sitting in front of her pink MacBook working on creating her own advertising banner, Rebecca asks for opinions on her work, “I know you’re working, but what do you think about this?” She lifts up her laptop to show me her blue colorful banner saying, “Keep Our Ocean Clean,” which looks like something that could be on any regular website you visit.
Getting a taste of all different kinds of art projects for nearly a year, Rebecca knows being a visualization major is no easy task. She says while laughing, “last semester I had three projects to do a week, I was dying. I still have a lot of work to do now, but I know it’ll all be worth it.”
One of the most recent projects she’s had to do was create a replica of a fruit of her choosing. “I decided to recreate an apple, I got a Styrofoam ball and then I sanded it down, paper mached it, then painted it. It took me like two days,” When I was shown the real apple and her replica, it was honestly hard to tell the difference. Her friends even told me to the side that they couldn’t tell which apple was the real one at first. (The real apple is on the left.)
Tran also has something to say to the people who have comments about her major being easy, “grading is subjective, so creating these different art projects isn’t as easy as some would think. In my life drawing class, my professor would say certain students who weren’t in that major would take that class ‘for fun.’ Hell no. It is hard, they would assign us some of the hardest projects at the beginning of the semester just to weed students out, it was super intense, those students would eventually drop out.”
When talking about her future, Rebecca looks up at the ceiling of her bedroom and says that she’ll probably go in the graphic design path. She lays her head down on her pillow and goes into detail about how she wants to work on packaging for different companies. Rebecca mentions that packing is so important and how she thinks sometimes it could be overlooked. “I know I’m guilty of buying things just for the packaging, like with makeup—so many people fall in love with the packaging. Presentation is truly everything, but you know, nothing is 100 percent set in stone yet.”
Rebecca is currently still taking visualization classes, hoping to graduate within about two years. She talks about the stress of the workload, saying even though it’s all stressful now, she’s enjoying it way more than when she was an engineering major.