Most Important Skills for a Visiting Assistant Professor as an Artist

I think executive functioning skills are important. It's a balance: having a creative vision that can bring a whole world of ideas to life, and then using executive functioning skills to make those ideas into shareable, palatable, meaningful experiences for others.

Bringing something as complicated as the intersection between art and games into other people's experience in an understandable way requires a balance between vision and practicality. This includes creating timetables, structures, and meaningful progressions of assignments.

It also requires the ability to switch your brain from a practical, organizational teacher mode to a creative, visionary, poet mode. This cognitive switching is one of the hardest and most important mechanisms.

The ability to switch modes of thinking and apply yourself to different problems, from the creative sphere to everyday scheduling and analytical executive functioning, is key. I also have Photoshop and Excel spreadsheet skills, which, along with basic design and organization skills, have always helped me.

When you can make a really dope Excel spreadsheet, people are amazed. Being able to design a cool syllabus cover also gets people excited about the creative directions we might go in a class.

Being able to design my own album covers or packaging for my games gives me more creative control over my research and practice as an artist. Sculpture skills, material skills, and research skills also come into play. Knowing how to traverse databases to learn about different fields of study gives a clear picture of those things. It's like an everything skill set.