Otis College First-Year Student Ari Matthews on How Summer of Art Prepared Him for College Life

“I attended Summer of Art for the overall experience of getting a feel for college life and the work that came with it.”

Otis College’s Summer of Art is a four-week pre-college program aimed at high school students ages 14.5 to 19. Students explore college-level courses in art and design, refine their skills, and build their portfolios in a studio-based environment. For first-year Otis College student Ari Matthews, Summer of Art gave him a taste of college life and helped in his decision to attend Otis for his BFA degree in Illustration with an emphasis in Concept Art. “I was considering a few other colleges, but Summer of Art had a huge impact on me wanting to come to Otis,” he says. “It helped that I already knew the campus, and the small community just felt right for me.”

Ari and his parents discovered Summer of Art when they were searching for a pre-college program at an art school. After researching several options, Ari applied to Summer of Art and got accepted. “My parents encouraged me to go for it,” he says of his decision to attend the summer after his junior year in high school. “I attended Summer of Art for the overall experience of getting a feel for college life and the work that came with it, as I had no idea what to expect. Going into it I assumed that the program would help ease any anxieties I had towards the next step in my academic career, and it did.” 

Before Summer of Art Ari says his artistic abilities were mostly self-taught. “But I had very minimal skills in drawing from observation and still life. It wasn’t that I couldn’t look at an apple and draw it, but rather that I struggled to understand how to make it look like a tangible apple with form to it,” he says. “Coming out of Summer of Art, I greatly improved on my still life and observational drawing skills. I produced a lot of still life works that prepared me for some of the work that was expected in my Foundation year here at Otis.”

The Summer of Art curriculum was challenging for Ari. “I felt a bit overwhelmed at first, but I found it easy to get the hang of it,” he says. “Despite the ease of the routine of it all, I still found myself being pushed hard enough to improve my skills.”

In addition to learning technical skills, Ari also got a taste of college life away from home, since he opted to dorm in campus housing during the month-long program. The housing option includes furnished, suite-style rooms in Otis’s Residence Hall—an award-winning, LEED-platinum-certified dormitory that was thoughtfully designed with light-filled rooms, ample lounge and study spaces, and a safe and secure location on campus. Residential Summer of Art students also get three weekday meals and two weekend meals per day at Elaine’s Dining Hall, which specializes in made-from-scratch, sustainably-sourced food options that cater to a wide variety of dietary preferences. 

“I learned a lot about how to manage living away from home in a dorm space and further improve my time management skills,” Ari says. A typical day involved waking up with an alarm clock to make sure he didn’t sleep in and then grabbing breakfast from Elaine’s before heading to whatever class he had for the day. “I think Summer of Art most prepared me for living in the dorms. The coursework was a bit harder to manage in the fast-paced Summer of Art environment than how I manage my work now.”

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