There is a particular feeling that surfaces when you scroll through LinkedIn, a kind of low-grade nausea at the mandatory enthusiasm. “Thrilled to announce…” “Excited to share…” It’s as if the self has become a press release. 

I understand this performance. As a journalism student, I’ve spent hours curating my social media, deleting old posts, and rewriting my bio to sound professional. I need a clean LinkedIn profile and a portfolio ready for potential employers. 

This doesn’t always feel good, but it feels necessary. 

Last week, in a class discussion about “radical imagination,” a classmate shared his concerns about the visual and media arts program. He described feeling as though the program was more focused on creating a brand out of his artwork and networking with people solely for personal gain — an approach that felt disingenuous and inauthentic to him. Others nodded; the room recognized itself.

The sentiment extends beyond the classroom. Jayda Weaver, a sophomore interdisciplinary studies major, told me she felt this pressure immediately. 

“I thought the whole point of college was to explore yourself through new classes and topics,” Weaver said, “but the moment I got to Emerson it was all about capitalizing on what you already know, skills you already have.”

This expectation doesn’t start at Emerson. By the time students arrive on campus, many have already spent high school building college applications as personal brands — curating extracurriculars, crafting narratives about their “passion,” performing a coherent identity for admissions officers. College is supposed to be where that performance can end, where you could finally explore your interests without calculating how it looks. But for many students, the pressure just intensifies, with higher stakes and a more explicit vocabulary around your “brand.”

I transferred to Emerson this semester. At my previous school, no one asked me to brand my writing before I wrote anything worth reading. No one asked me to define my journalistic voice before I reported my first real story. The timeline matters. These VMA students weren’t describing professional preparation — they were describing pressure to commodify their artistic identity before they’d discovered what it was.

Here’s what makes this pressure rational rather than paranoid: Over the past few decades, arts funding has declined, media industries have consolidated, and creative work has been systemically devalued. Emerson’s tuition has increased significantly while stable positions in creative fields have declined. Federal projections show virtually no job growth for craft and fine artists through 2034, with available positions mainly emerging as workers exit the profession — meaning students graduate with more debt into fewer secure jobs.

The pressure for students to identify their niche early is a logical response to structural precarity that universities have helped create. Yet they expect students to solve this individually through better personal branding. 

Art requires space to explore, to fail, to follow ideas that lead nowhere. When students are asked to begin building a professional identity from day one, that exploratory space disappears. The question becomes not “What do I want to make?” but “What will be marketable?” 

“I’m certain about the medium of art I want to make, but not the theme,” said Weaver. “I feel like I don’t know enough about anything yet. I’m still exploring the themes I’m interested in, but I feel like there is an emphasis on time that stresses me out.”

When I emailed Emerson’s President Jay Bernhardt about this pressure, he described career preparation as a “four-year developmental arc” where early professionalization means “curiosity and risk-taking by trying new things and finding your voice.” This vision is reasonable, but the gap between this ideal and what students are experiencing suggests the implementation may not be matching the intention. 

I think this gap reveals a larger problem: You cannot ask students to be curious risk-takers in a system structured around certainty and risk-avoidance.

I’m not arguing against career preparation — heck, I’m doing it myself. What I’m questioning is whether we can ask teenagers to brand themselves before they know who they are and call it “education,” rather than training for a specific form of self-commodification that has become a prerequisite to participation in creative work.

What would it look like to protect the first year’s exploration? To tell freshmen: Your job right now is not to think about the market, but to experiment; to try things that might not work, without calculating their market value. The objections are predictable — the market is competitive. Students need every advantage. Other schools start career prep early. If Emerson doesn’t do this, students will be at a disadvantage.

These concerns are real. They’re also a perfect description of a race to the bottom, where the competitive pressure to prepare students earlier creates the very conditions that make early preparation seem necessary. Every school that capitulates to this logic makes it harder for any school to resist it. 

I don’t have a comprehensive solution because I don’t think there is one that doesn’t involve changing the structural conditions that created this problem. Protecting the first year for personal and artistic exploration and telling freshmen they don’t have to know what makes their art unique yet is vital — that’s what they’re here to learn. These are decent ideas that would require an institution willing to accept that its students might be temporarily less competitive in exchange for potentially becoming better artists. 

I doubt that’s possible under current conditions. The economic model of high education, the collapse of creative work’s security, and the social media-age transformation of art into content aren’t problems a better curriculum can solve.

I’m a student trying to understand something I’ve observed. The nausea I feel scrolling through LinkedIn isn’t just personal discomfort; it might be a signal that something has shifted in how we think about education, selfhood, and work. If art students are learning to package themselves before they know who they are, we’re not just being shortchanged — we’re training a generation to mistake legibility for creativity and optimization for artistic vision.