About Me
"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things."
- Leonardo da Vinci
My name is Miranda Santana. I am a student at South Piedmont Community College (SPCC) and the President of the SPCC Art Club.
I am currently working towards obtaining an Associate in Fine Arts in Visual Arts degree. After accomplishing this I intend to transfer to The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) where I plan to major in Fine Art with a Studio Art Concentration in Illustration.
Drawing, creating, and designing characters, and writing stories have been my biggest passions since I was a small child. There is little else that I feel quite as passionate about. I hit a point, however, where I began to feel stuck and unmotivated. I decided for myself that if I wanted to get out of this slump and really take this passion seriously, I should become formally educated in the techniques and practices needed to succeed as a professional artist.
My school experience as a child was less than ideal. I struggled to keep up and felt as though the teachers did not particularly care about me or my growth as a student. I was not socially successful either and was bullied for my inability to keep up with the rest of the class. These two issues became so prominent that by the time I was in the fourth grade my mother pulled me out of school to home-school me. However, with both of my parents working full-time, homeschooling became a difficult endeavor, and I was unmotivated and unwilling to study in the way that I was meant to. I instead got into creative writing and character design as a hobby to cope with the boredom and loneliness I struggled with at the time and poured almost all of my time into those things. Though I wasn't aware of it at the time, my dedication to the former resulted in me teaching myself to read and write to such a level that by the time I was thirteen years old I was able to read at a college level. This experience taught me how to learn by myself, even if the method was unconventional.
In 2018 I finally took the GED tests. My initial plan with taking it had been simply to make myself more employable but plans quickly changed. I had believed up until that point that formal learning and test-taking were beyond me, and I just could not do it. But when I passed three out of four tests with little-to-no difficulty and somehow managed to pass math on my first attempt (despite math being my absolute worst subject), something changed in my brain. It was as if a light switched on, and suddenly the world opened up to me. I was neither as incapable nor as limited as I had convinced myself that I was, and it was in the car ride home from taking the last test that I decided that I wanted to attend college.
The quote I shared at the beginning by Leonardo da Vinci really stands out to me because even though it took a long time, I now understand that if I want to reach my goals, I am the only one that can take the steps needed to get there. I believe that determination and a good work ethic will take me where I want to go.