I Graduated. Again. A 4.0, Ten Thousand Dollars, and a Marijuana Dog Poster That Nobody Asked For.

Two degrees + Two professional certifications. Thirty-five years. A 4.0 GPA. Nicki Zeller on what changes when you pay for your own education — and a partial inventory of the worst art ever produced at the University of Calgary. Nicki Zeller graduated from the University of Calgary's Graphic Design and Integrated Digital Media program with a 4.0 GPA — her third post-secondary credential, and by far her best. In this episode she walks through the full financial and emotional cost of adult learning, the disasters that preceded the 4.0, and why failure hits completely differently at fifty than it did at nineteen.

Including: the portrait of her nephew that she cannot take back. The marijuana dog poster that ended up Barney purple. And a still life that her professor described, charitably, as having "interesting use of negative space."

This is a victory lap. It's also an honest accounting. Both things are true.

---
🎙️ Nicole's Notes is published every Friday on cokeontherocks.ca
✍️ Read the companion blog post: cokeontherocks.ca 
📩 Connect: nicole@cokeontherocks.ca

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Okay, I finally graduated. Third program, uh, professional certification at the University of Calgary in graphic design. Ooh, and there's a convocation in the fall. And I am going. I am going to make it a whole thing. Nobody can stop me. Uh, but before the victory lap, and there's absolutely a victory lap, I have earned it. Strap in. I need to tell you the full story. Because the full story is the only story worth telling. And the full story starts with a 19-year-old girl who was handed money she did not earn and spent it on a genuinely spectacular time. All right, degree one, political science, University of Calgary, 1995. My parents paid my first year. And I also want to be fully transparent here. The Saskatchewan government gave me a scholarship for disabled students. They looked at this girl with cystic fibrosis and said, Here, we believe in you. Go get an education. I took that money and I went to university and I had the best time. I was social, I was present, just not in class. I was extremely committed to the full university experience. The part that doesn't appear on a transcript. When GPA does not bear repeating on a public podcast, what I will say is that it was the kind of GPA that makes your parents go very quiet on the phone. The kind where your academic advisor uses the phrase, let's talk about your options in a tone that implies your options are limited. The Saskatchewan government believed in me and I let them down. I think about that sometimes. Not enough to go back and change it. What's done is done, but enough to understand what it means to have skin in the game. Or more precisely what it means when you don't. I graduated. Barely, but I graduated. All right, degree two, Spanish. Also, University of Calgary, 2008. This time, I paid over $14,000 of my own money. Money earned. Money that had my name on it in the way that actually means something. The way where if you light it on fire, you feel it physically in your chest. Different person by then. Different relationship with failure. Because here's what changes when you write the check yourself. Failure stops being abstract. Failure becomes $14,000 thrown into oncoming traffic. Failure is your money mangled on the highway with tire tracks on it. I left with a 3.6 GPA. I showed up, I did the work, I wrote the papers, and they weren't produced at 2 a.m. in a panic. Turns out when you're paying for something yourself, when you've already embarrassed yourself once, when you are older, the stakes feel real, and you take it seriously. Who knew? Apparently not 19-year-old me. So program three, graphic design. Almost $10,000. My money again. So let's do the full accounting. Saskatchewan scholarship spent on my social life, bless their hearts. $14,000 of my own dollars on Spanish. $10,000 of my own dollars on graphic design. That is a lot of money to spend on education across 30 years. That is a significant personal investment in becoming someone who knows things. And this time a 4.0. 4.0, hey hey. Now I want you to understand the math of that. When you are an adult learner, when you have written the check, when you have done this before, and you know exactly what failure costs, failure is not a grade on a piece of paper anymore. Failure is $10,000 with tire tracks on it, bleeding out on Crow Child Trail. Failure is looking at yourself in the mirror and explaining why you lit your own money on fire. That does not happen. You do not allow that to happen. You show up every class, every assignment, every art history lecture, when you would rather be literally anywhere else on the surface of the earth. You show up because the alternative is a financial and personal catastrophe that you have too much self-respect to accept. That's not inspiration, that is arithmetic. Very expensive arithmetic. Now, before I accept my own applause, and I will absolutely be accepting my own applause, I need to walk you through what this 4.0 was actually built on top of. Because I want to be honest about the journey. So here's a partial inventory of my creative disasters. The apples. Oh, I don't. Ha ha. Anyways, drawing 101, still life. Ceramic jug, two apples, drapery. And my professor said, draw what you see. I drew what I felt, which is completely different than what I saw. The apples were lumpy in a way that suggested they had lived through something, and they had survived hardship. Maybe it was a metaphor for my life. They were not apples so much as a meditation on suffering rendered in tubi pencil. My professor looked at the finished piece and said, This has been a really good try. That was the full review. I have dined out on it ever since. But for the record, I thought my pastel version was fantastic. The walkman, the apples, the drapery behind them, I showed people. And I said, look what I made. Whether those people agreed is a question I have chosen not to investigate. Now the portrait of my nephew. Oh boy. This was the illustration portion of the class. Portrait work. I chose my nephew because I love him. And I thought, this will be beautiful. He will frame this. It was not that. Uh, it looked like a caricature of a completely different human being. Not unkind, just a stranger. Rendered with love and technical failure in equal measure. And here's the thing: I showed him. I was proud. I said, look, Andrew, I drew you. I watched a small piece of him die in real time. He was polite about it. He is a good person. And we have never spoken of it again. By mutual, unspoken, deeply merciful agreement. The portrait has been deleted from every device I own. I will never draw someone I know again. That is my vow. Witnesses have heard it. Oh, this business card. This was the typography unit. Early days. I designed a business card that I can only describe as having been plucked from a sea of mediocre. Every font was competing, nothing was breathing, no hierarchy, no logic. It looked like a business card designed by someone who had heard of business cards but never actually held one. I look at it now and I feel things, not good things. Oh, and then my Barney poster. Adobe Photoshop class. We had to design a poster. I had a great concept. Public awareness for veterinary clinics about the effects of marijuana on dogs. Relevant. Timely. Dogs are eating edibles at an alarming rate, and someone needs to say something. The concept was solid. The execution was a war crime. I could not figure out the background. I tried everything. I layered, I blended, I applied effects. I did not understand the colors that did not want to cooperate with me. What I ended up with was a background that can only be described as Barney the Dinosaur. The specific shade of purple, that particular energy. That specific shade of purple. My important public health poster about dogs and cannabis looked like it was produced by a children's television network having a very confusing day. I submitted it anyway. I got the grade and we do not linger. Now let's pivot to the other list. Because two years is a long time and a lot happened, and I think we don't do this enough. We don't stop and actually read the winds back to ourselves out loud. So here they are. I built a brand from scratch, logo, color palette, typography system, voice, full platform architecture, launched Nicole's notes properly, with infrastructure that actually holds, built Cokeontherocks.ca through three theme iterations. I am not discussing the first two, and how many times I had to reset the entire thing and start over. I produced multiple podcast series. William Wright, Carl Jung, The North American Cultural Collapse, and five episodes about the false savior and how we can try to save people who are drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. I designed a children's comic book, The Misadventures of Winston George, illustrated and laid out frame by frame. Completed a 23-slide capstone presentation in front of a faculty jury and presented it like I had been doing this for years. I actually did my own animation, made my own GIF from scratch. Graduated with a 4.0. With, and I want to be clear about this, lungs that operate at approximately 25% capacity while running a platform, while producing this broadcast, while being a full human person whose life does not pause for finals. That's the list. That's what two years looks like when you decide that failure is not an option you can financially or personally afford. One more thing. Where the apples break me, where the Barney poster is the last thing I make, and I quietly close a laptop and say, This was a mistake. I'm too old. This dragon is too big. That version doesn't exist. Not because I'm fearless. I sat in that drawing class surrounded by 20-year-olds who could actually render a piece of fruit. And I felt every single year between us, I felt the gap. I felt the absurdity. I also felt the $10,000 sitting behind me like a very patient, very expensive chaperone. And I faced it anyway. Every bad drawing, every wrong font, every purple background that had no business being purple. I showed up, I submitted the work, I absorbed the feedback, and I got better. Because that is the only move. It has always been the only move. Find the dragon, slay the dragon, walk toward it, and then graduate. I'm Nicole Zeller. Thank you for listening. And remember, stay fierce, the world will adjust.