From art to auto tech, students use electives inside and outside of the classroom for different purposes. Whether they’re going into a career with their electives or choose to keep it as a hobby, electives help students with self-expression, other classes and life after school.
Inspired by her mother’s small business, sophomore art student Evelyn Chisolm has made small wooden decorations outside of school.
“Art can be used in any possible way,” Chisholm said. “It helps me get out the feelings that I can’t say. It’s very therapeutic. If I continue doing art, I could make small things and sell them to small businesses or whatever. My mom runs a small business and I’m inspired by what she does.”
After taking up painting during quarantine, Andre Aldama (12), has painted backgrounds and nature, even using some to decorate his house. Since then, he has moved to 3D art and ceramics.
“If I didn’t have art or time to do art, I would feel it in my life,” Aldama said. “It’s something I really want to keep doing. I think it would mostly be a hobby. Maybe I’ll have some clay and I’ll work with it in my house.”
Despite hopes to study something other than art, Aldama takes what he’s learned from art and applies it as a hobby.
“It’s really relaxing, clay,” Aldama said. “What I picked up from ceramics is that sometimes things take a while to show the result because in ceramics it mostly takes two or three months. A lot of time to do the pieces and little by little you see the effect of it.”
Following curiosities from growing up on cartoons and movies and how they are made, Andrew Botello (12), digs deeper into the art with his Practicum of Animation class.
“What helped me in animation was expressing my ideas and thoughts in different ways,” Botello said. “Because of animation, I’ve made a lot more stuff outside of the classroom as well. It’s just kind of been an outlet for my imagination.”
In the advanced level of the class, Botello can work on projects of his choosing, helping him to hopefully pursue a career with it.
“I definitely do want to use [animation] later on in life,” Botello said. “I want to 3D model for games and environments.”
Finding an interest in auto tech through classes at school, Maia Escamilla (12) takes her knowledge out of the classroom with an internship at the Austin Infiniti Car dealership and hopes to be hired there after graduation.
“I’d probably say one of the biggest takeaways from it is problem-solving because it’s really similar to engineering,” Escamilla said. “It’s all this one big puzzle like it’s all just these little parts that go together and make this one big thing. It has a lot to do with problem-solving.”
Along with working at a dealership after high school, Escamilla plans to attend Universal Technical Institute in Pflugerville.
“I will be learning more and I’m also gonna be working at Infiniti at the same time like while I’m in the school,” Escamilla said. “After I’m done with school, my plan is just to hop around at different dealerships and gain experience and learn some stuff.”
After joining on a whim, Grace Marshall (12) finds use for debate in other classes.
“It’s really good for education because you learn about a bunch of different topics that you wouldn’t usually delve into but you’re forced to delve into them because of debate,” Marshall said. “You can use it for outside knowledge or other topics at school that you wouldn’t normally know about but you’re already exposed to them.”
Using speech to aid his acting, Forest Trammell (11), is able to reinforce his strength in public speaking and learn new skills.
“It’s pretty good practice for acting,” Trammell said. “It’s definitely a lot more research than I normally do, seeing as the past week, it’s been the entire class period of me and my friend just sitting there researching topics for what we might need so I’ve definitely discovered a few good research sites and whatnot that help me do that so when I start needing to write really big papers and stuff in college, I’ll be able to know those resources I can use.”
