Student Profile: Mia Mahar
When Mia Mahar is working at her summer job, tending plants in a greenhouse, she feels the same kind of absorption she experiences while painting or designing a digital graphic.
“It puts you in a state of flow,” she says. “Psychologically, it’s kind of like a meditative state. It’s not mindlessly doing things, but it’s a state of mind where you’re more relaxed.”
Drawing connections between creative activity and psychology comes naturally to Mahar. She finds it hard to pin herself down to a single interest. As a junior at Hilbert College, she’s pursuing a double major in psychology and digital media and communication, with a concentration in graphic design.
In some of her research papers for her psychology courses, she’s explored the benefits of art for mental health. “When you’re doing art, disorder symptoms are still there, but the severity goes down,” she says. “It helps you put your feelings onto a piece of paper without having to put them in words.”
Drawing Recognition
As long as she can remember, Mahar has been putting images on paper. Growing up in Buffalo, New York, she started drawing cartoons and progressed to human figures.
When she took a college-level art class in high school, her teacher encouraged her to enter a citywide art competition. She submitted a charcoal drawing titled “Self-Portrait With Dog.” To her surprise, she won the best of show award.
Another Advanced Placement class awakened her interest in psychology. “I liked understanding the mind, both on a philosophical level and a scientific level,” she says.
In her senior year of high school, Mahar visited several local colleges. She was attracted to Hilbert because of its small-campus feel and the accessibility of its professors. She debated which of her interests to choose as a major, and ultimately decided on psychology.
Mind and Environment
As Mahar studied the history of psychology and its various schools, she felt most drawn to behaviorism, which finds common elements in human and animal psychology.
“So much of psychology works on understanding disorders like depression and PTSD,” she says. “I like to focus on simpler things, like how your dog impacts your mental health. I’m interested in understanding how your environment impacts you, like how plants affect people in a home environment or living out in the countryside.”
Mahar’s curiosity was stimulated by her summer job. She had always had a collection of house plants, but the greenhouse opened her eyes to how much she still had to learn.
“I’ve learned things like types of fungal infections and pests,” she says. “I’ve learned stuff like how to read fertilizers and their ratios, remembering the flower types and their light requirements, how long they bloom, and whether they come back every year or not.”
Adding Art
Although she enjoyed psychology, by her second year, Mahar was feeling hemmed in. “I have so many interests, it’s hard to pick just one career path,” she says.
She felt drawn to her old passion for art, and to Hilbert’s digital media and communication program. With a concentration in graphic design, she reasoned, she might also expand her career options by adding a marketable skill.
She wondered whether she’d be able to handle two majors at once. But Hilbert, she found, made it easier for her. Her professors were flexible about adjusting their class schedules to avoid conflicts. The two departments allowed a few classes to count toward both majors.
“It’s not like there’s a curriculum set in stone,” she says. “They’re willing to work with you on what you want to get out of the program and to help you make that happen.”
Mahar plunged into graphic design programs like Adobe Illustrator and the free painting software Krita. Her favorite assignment was designing a book cover for the classic psychological novel Crime and Punishment.
Hilbert’s program also exposed her to other forms of digital communication. She played a small part in a short film, while also helping create costumes and special effects and edit video. Her experience paid off for another student team she was part of that won a contest to design a new logo and branding for a local nonprofit agency.
Interests Evolve
Unlike many artists who see creating art chiefly as self-expression, Mahar also views it as a social activity. She thinks not only about what she wants to say with her art, but how it will connect with others.
“I hope to use the psychology part of my degree to understand how to appeal to audiences,” she says. “An important part of doing creative work is understanding other people as well as understanding yourself.”
One of her favorite artists, she notes, is the late Kim Jung Gi, who gained fame drawing elaborate comic-book panels in front of live crowds.
At Hilbert, Mahar promotes the social side of art through an art club she started. She has organized paint nights where she lays out supplies and snacks and students make art while they chat with friends.
She hopes eventually to put both parts of her degree to use in the field of concept art, creating big-picture visual designs for interactive media such as video games, as well as for movies and television.
“It gives the directors and producers an idea of the creative direction that they want to take their piece of media,” Mahar says. “A lot of it is having a portfolio of work that shows what you can bring to the table. I hope that the digital media part of my degree helps me with that.”
But she’s open to other professional possibilities. “You change and you evolve as you go through life,” she says. “My worldviews might change 10 years from now, or my outlook on careers might change. It’s like painting. The person who finishes a painting might not be the same as the person who started it.”
Explore a Creative Career in Digital Media
In today’s dynamic world of digital media, interdisciplinary studies can enable individuals to generate valuable ideas from outside-the-box perspectives. A degree program such as Hilbert College’s Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media and Communication program can help students integrate insights from other fields by offering flexibility in personalizing their curriculum. Find out how Hilbert can prepare you for a rewarding creative career in digital media.
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