Senior Sabrina Ulibarri plans to go into education for elementary school students despite the uncertainty of technological distractions or student behavior.
Ulibarri mentions that while education is not a super high-paying job, she thinks the reward for her would be benefiting kids and giving them a safe space at school.
“I’ve always loved working with children of [many] different kinds,” Ulibarri said, “and I’ve been super welcoming to different kinds of children, all ages and… the wide range of disabilities.”
Ulibarri hopes to provide children a safe place to go each day, regardless of their situation at home. She wants them to feel “motivated to come to school and [just] feel happy to be [at school] and safe.”
Despite her certainty about her career choice, she knows the education field in general is changing.
“I know people are having more issues in classrooms because technology is a really big distraction with the younger generation,” Ulibarri said. “So I think that could be maybe a concern of making it more difficult for future educators to work with children, but overall, I will be pretty driven to continue pursuing it, since I’ve been wanting to do this since I was young.”
For Ulibarri, teaching is a career done by multiple family members, her mother is an elementary school teacher. Her grandfather was an educator as well. And she plans to become a third-generation teacher in her family.
“My parents are super supportive. My mom’s an elementary school educator, which inspired me. So I have been in her classroom before, so that’s kind of where I got my inspiration. My grandpa was also an educator,” Ulibarri said.
Senior Ashley Mitchell knows what people say about AI replacing artists, and she has heard the starving artist myth, but she’s planning to pursue an animation career anyway.
“People kind of underestimate the stability the art can have as a career because it’s very flexible. There are a lot of things that you can do with it,” Mitchell said. “I’m very interested in entertainment and storytelling, especially visual storytelling.”
Mitchell mentions how she would love to go into animation, make movies, and be involved in the pre-development stages of movies, which she says is the concept phase of a movie.
“I’m also interested in someday doing something for comic books, or doing some sort of visual storytelling for comic books, because I feel the visuals [in] movies and graphic novels, they really carry a lot of the story and message,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell talks about how college plays into her animation career and how long, if any, she needs to go to college
Mitchell mentions that for animation, college is not technically needed, saying that an artist just has to build up a portfolio and be able to use art software, and sometimes have an online presence.
“One of the main reasons that people going into art fields [go] to college [is] for networking reasons. So I plan on going to college for networking reasons and also to learn software and collaboration,” Mitchell said.
