Mallory Lang (Class of 2024)
Blogger Role: Art Therapy
Major: Art Therapy
Minor: Psychology
Clubs: The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS), Marywood University Student Art Therapy Association (MUSATA), Psi Chi International Psychology Honor Society, and Zeta Omicron, Kappa Pi International Art Honor Society.
I chose Marywood because of the great five year master program for art therapy (BA2MA), as well as the small campus and tight knit community they create. I come from a small town in New Jersey so my high school was made up of 600 students on a good day, I created relationships with my teachers in high school and that is something I valued and wanted in my future education. Since Marywood is a smaller school, the professors can learn who you are as a person and won’t think of you as just a number in a lecture hall. This has allowed me to create relationships with my professors and the head of my program in Art Therapy.
I am majoring in Art because it is one of my passions and I would love to make a career out of it. I have always been a creative person and I have taken art classes for as long as I have known. I use art as a creative outlet when needed, which has allowed me to realize that that is the future job I want to pursue. I want to help people through art which is why I am majoring in Art Therapy. I have been studying Art Therapy for about a year now and I can’t picture myself doing anything else.
When I’m not in class, I’m at the gym or hanging out with my friends. I have been going to the gym for years, I used to play sports and when I stopped I wanted to continue my growth physically so I started to go to the gym. Lifting has become an important part of my life and I love how it feels to hit a PR or go to the gym and feel better mentally after. I also love hanging out with my friends, whether it is doing homework or having dinner or watching a movie. I love being surrounded by people and meeting new people, it makes me happy to have a support system like that.
So far, my favorite art class at Marywood was either two dimensional art or three dimensional art. Both gave me the creative liberty I love and the professors really worked with the students fairly. With these courses it is not just drawing a still life or a person, they give you a prompt or a list of things or mediums you need to cover or use and you can go anywhere you want with that. It reminded me of the creative liberty we had in high school. I feel like I need to create more than just stare at objects and draw them because that seems extremely boring to me, but creative liberty is exciting to me.
The coolest thing I’ve done at Marywood so far was go sledding in a storage bin at midnight in February. It was a spontaneous decision that my friends and I had made at around midnight. It was one night where we were getting nonstop snow and we did not want to be trapped in our rooms anymore. So we walked over to the hill by the commuter lot near Loughran Hall and then to the hill by the baseball field and we started to sled. It was so much fun and by the time we looked at our phones again almost three hours had passed, we didn’t want to stop but ended up going back to sleep but it was probably one of the most fun things I have done here so far.
When I graduate I would like to become an art therapist in a hospital and use my time off to travel. My grandparents travel so much and I have seen pictures from every trip that they have gone to and the sights are breathtaking. I would love to travel and go to all the places they have gone all over the world. for work I would like to be in a hospital doing Medical Art Therapy, with this I could see patients in their rooms before or after surgery, patients with cancer or terminal illness, parents of children in the hospital or NICU, or even patients in the ER or in a psych unit. I think that the variety of patients is interesting and I would love to help people in the best way I could and help make their time in the hospital the best I possibly could.
I’d recommend the Art program at Marywood because the professors really care about their students and give a great foundation for the rest of their art careers. It is also a very strong program and I have found many new techniques and loves while being at Marywood. It allows you to experience new techniques and courses that you could in high school or on your own time while having a professor who can guide you through it. The professors in the art department really care about the students and want to see them succeed and improve on their skills and ideas, which as a student I really appreciate and love. Because of these reasons I would recommend Marywood to anyone considering our art program.
