While this is just a joke, it really hit home. I went to an art school with the hopes of getting a job in the video game industry, and applied for a program that was catered directly towards developing the skills necessary to get hired. "95% of our graduates immediately get hired in the video game industry!" After about a year and a half of going to this school, I discovered they were advertising on the Jerry Springer TV block. It was a shocking, horrifying moment in my life. I remember seeing all these diploma mill fraud campuses flaunting some feel-good bullshit about getting a job as an aide, associate, or consultant of some sort, and I ridiculed all of them and the idiots who actually went. And now here I was. One of the idiots. Our school upped their marketing and advertised like crazy, now appearing on bus stops and street signs in crappy neighborhoods. They were aiming at the lowest common denominator of humanity, the desperate, the struggling. I got to watch during my second year attending this school all the changes being made, the curriculum getting revamped, the good expensive teachers with knowledge and experience getting shuffled out and replaced by a slew of recent graduates who couldn't find work but was willing to work as a teacher on the cheap. Figure drawing courses were cut 75%, resulting in students having only one quarter of figure drawing experience instead of a full year. Educational software licenses for ZBrush and Maya were left to expire, forcing us to "acquire" them through our own means. The quality of the student body became dismal, turning our campus into a laughingstock of comically low standards, admitting the talentless, the hacks, the illiterate, not because they saw "hidden potential," just some dope they could sign up for their aggressive tuition payment plan. The downstairs computer lab was closed, so they could expand the student loans department. I toughed it out, hoping that my portfolio would let me shine and allow me to stand apart from my peers. My school wouldn't get me a job. It was all up to me now. The quality of education plummeted, the long-standing department chairs with decades of industry experience jumped ship, and my department ended up getting helmed by a notorious art director of a AAA videogame publisher who I would later learn was a complete disgrace and reviled across the entire industry for his awful work habits, vulgar attitude, and unprofessional diva nonsense. And he was pressing the students to be just like him, act like him, have the same expectations upon others that got him tossed and blacklisted. I graduated in 2007. The market crashed. Studios and publishers were closing left and right. A massive shift of the workforce was thrown into a tumultuous quantum state of indecision as the rogue wave of smartphones left the industry divided between developing for console or mobile platforms. Nobody wanted fresh faces, they wanted established talent. And with the closure of so many studios, there was far more established talent than fresh faces swarming linkedin and job boards. My only call back was from a desperate ploy on Craigslist. THQ needed QA testers. I did not go to college for four years and get a degree to be a damn QA tester, but I needed something to pay for the roof over my head, and I applied, hoping it would just be a temporary thing while the market sorted itself out. I remember walking into my first training session there, and being greeted excitedly by three old friends in there. These people graduated this art school the same year I did. It wasn't a temporary thing. I tried and tried, but the industry kept shrinking, the "entry level" applicants were all required to have five-plus years industry experience in that field, and I was only so lucky that I was really good at QA because it allowed my "summer recovery phase" to turn into a consistent four year long gig at minimum wage. And my fellow graduates and I kept crossing paths as we were shuffled from project to project, developer to developer, and after THQ closed, publisher to publisher. We met more of our fellow alumni, all in the same boat, all coasting well below the poverty line, and as we grew in numbers, we all discovered we all shared the same little anecdote of a particular phone call we would receive early into our foray in the QA department. We all got the call. Career services. They were checking up on us, seeing how we were. We would tell them it was horrible, that nobody was hiring fresh artistic talent, that they were either using long-established industry veterans or outsourcing all their work as contract labor to south-east Asia. We would do anything to get out of this stupid QA nightmare we'd flung ourselves into thinking it was our only option to getting a foot in the door. "Oh, so you're working QA!" The man from career services would cheerfully pronounce. "Congratulations! Glad you could find a job in the video game industry!" And then it hits us. The flashbacks all come roaring back. "95% of our graduates immediately get hired in the video game industry!" We were the 95%. We were the overwhelming majority of graduates that the school used to inflate itself and make itself sound far better than it was. We were collectively acting as the deceptive statistic that would trick impressionable young artists into giving that school all their money for a crap degree. I took the name of the university off my resume. I just said that I had a degree in the related field, then went straight into work experience. I scoured the Internet and found freelancing oddjobs here and there in other artistic fields like web design, interface design, and comic illustration. I put them all down on the resume. I wasn't a graduate of this art school, I was just an artist with lots of clients. It took a couple years of freelancing, and it was doubly hard work having to juggle it on top of the QA job to keep the electricity turned on, but doing so helped expand my portfolio enough that my education was irrelevant. My art could finally speak for itself, and I could take that dumpster fire of a school off completely to save space on the cover letter. I worked my ass off, taught myself new techniques that weren't taught in schools, and then started applying again. And for the first time since I graduated, it happened. A callback. For art services. I went in, and interviewed. I got to shake hands with an actual art director that was active at a AAA publisher, exchange contact info, talk about myself, and tell him what it's like to be a self-taught artist just working his hardest to hopefully ascend from QA. I unfortunately didn't get the job. But that doesn't matter. I got a callback. I'm making progress in the right direction, and my hopes are getting higher. My freelancing gigs on the side are also becoming more ambitious, as the jobs of creating buttons for websites and menu headers for restaurants has augmented into coloring comic covers for major comic publishers, and doing the background art for independent animation projects. If the video game industry doesn't want me, I'm already several steps into developing a portfolio for the comic and animation industry. I'm not there yet, I'm still among my fellow alumni still floating by at the minimum wage mark. But it's progress. The school lost its accreditation a couple years ago, I'm witnessing a surge of disenchanted dropouts pouring into the very QA department I'm in, and if there's any silver lining, I can at least assure them that they're not alone in their predicament. There are many like them. Many like us. But there is none like me. And none like you. I'm going to make it on my own, and they'll have to make it on their own. Because that's how I want to be remembered. The one who did it himself. I'm not going to be remembered as the 95%.