Howdy! My name is Joshua Burgos Rivera, and I’m a Visualization student at Texas A&M University looking to become a professional animator. I’m especially interested in 3D modeling, rigging, and animation. With my freshman year in the program concluded, I’d like to share some of my experiences and how it’s affected my journey as an artist. I really enjoyed my Visualization classes, and my professors helped me grow significantly with both my physical and digital artwork. I appreciate the feedback I received from my professors, and the class critiques were helpful. I also joined two Viz organizations, 2VD and SIGGRAPH, which helped sharpen my storyboarding skills and deepen my understanding of the animation industry, respectively. Additionally, I volunteered at several TAMU events this year, including the Visualization Fall Show, where I helped hang artwork; The Big Event — the largest single-day, student-run community service project in the country — where I served as a Job Site Leader for a group of Visualization classmates and we helped clean up the yard of a local resident; and Viz-a-GoGo, where I helped curate works for the show and assisted with setting up the exhibit. I was also honored to have 5 works accepted into Viz-a-GoGo, an annual student-run showcase of Visualization students’ work from the past year. My 5 accepted works included 3 time-based animations, 1 CG render, and 1 sculpture. I was surprised when my solo personal animation project won Best in Time-Based Media! Being inspired by other artists is what got me into art, so having the opportunity to learn and improve my skills is exactly what I will continue to do during my time in college. I want to share my art with the world, inspire more people to create, and ultimately bring positivity to people’s lives.

When I swung a golf club for the first time, I didn’t realize that I would end up learning one of the most important lessons about life and achievement. Golf became one of my favorite sports, but it also brought me so much frustration. Despite carefully setting up my swing and following a checklist of mechanics to hit the ball correctly, the ball would hook into the woods, land in a bunker, or splash into the water. Even when I would hit the ball over 100 yards in the fairway, I would question why it didn’t go 250 yards like I had done several times before at the driving range. Striving for perfection often left me feeling disappointed and unsatisfied with my game. All that changed one day, as I was watching Tiger Woods play in a Master’s tournament on TV. Woods teed up on a par 3 hole over a water hazard. His first shot landed then rolled down into the water. He had to take a drop and hit again. His third stroke landed on the green then rolled back down into the water. After taking another drop, his next shot finally cleared, but landed in the bunker. Woods then proceeded to hit the ball out of the bunker only for it to roll past the green and down into the water. Another drop. He got out of the bunker then two-putted, ending with a 10 on a par 3 (+7)! What really surprised me was the fact that this was someone who golfs professionally and had put so much time into the game, and he had performed so terribly on this single hole. Even I had never hit the ball into the water that many times on one hole before! If that happened to me, in all honesty, I would have exploded. But this was Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer to ever play the game. And he didn’t play a perfect game. That’s when I realized the reason that I couldn’t perfectly execute every shot is because it’s impossible. Even at the highest level, the pros make mistakes all the time. Mistakes are part of the game. Golf taught me that excellence doesn’t mean that I’ll always hit a perfect shot; it means you understand that obstacles will come your way, and you have to navigate through them and keep moving forward. This realization was transformational for the way I approached playing. From that point on, I started to enjoy golf more. I looked at missed shots as challenges rather than as bad shots. I kept a positive mindset and even though I would bogey, double bogey, or even sometimes quadruple bogey, I would remember Tiger Woods hitting a +7 on a par 3. Then I’d think to myself, “hey, it could’ve been worse.” I applied this mindset to my life. Perfection shouldn’t be the focus, and the way you handle adversity shapes your journey. Through golf, I gained a new respect for resilience and appreciating the experience rather than focusing on my perceived imperfections. I will carry this lesson into college, where I know I can’t and won’t be perfect. Keeping a positive mindset and learning to adapt to overcome challenges will be important for me to fully embrace my learning journey and make the most of my personal growth in college.

In my junior year of high school, a lack of mental fortitude was plaguing my ability to play tennis and have fun. This wasn’t the first time I had this problem in a sport either; I used to play golf, and while I was a decent player, I would get frustrated over shots that weren’t executed perfectly. The perfectionist mindset had taken root in golf and transitioned into tennis; definitely not a mindset you want to have in any sport. In my junior year, a shin injury prevented me from playing tennis. My leg would hurt whenever I ran or changed direction, sometimes even just when I walked. As any student athlete would do if they got injured, I was pretty upset when I learned I wouldn’t be able to play. After recovering from the injury, I went back to playing as normal, ramping back up and shaking off rust. Everything went back to the way it was before. Including my perfectionist mindset. My negative attitude and self-talk continued to linger in my mind every time I would play, to the point where my family questioned if I even enjoyed the sport anymore. That’s when I got the exact same injury again my senior year. And again, I was frustrated. Why was I the only one on the team that always seemed to be sitting out? Why the exact same injury? However, this time something had changed slightly in the way I thought. Now with my mind more focused on college planning with the help of my parents and contemplating my future, I was finally able to put everything into a perspective I’ve needed since day one. Nobody can ever be perfect. Not only in sports, but in life. The fact that I was going to college soon helped me to realize this, since I thought, “You’re getting mad over a game that you chose to play for fun and exercise? It’s not like I’m planning on going pro.” In the months that I sat out of practice, I found small ways to help out the coach and team other than playing. I would help set up practice, carry around tables or ball baskets, put up and take down the scorecards on match days, or cheer on the team when they were playing. By being injured twice, I finally realized how to be less frustrated at every mistake and just appreciate the opportunity to play a sport I enjoy. Recently I’ve started to recover from my second shin injury, and had the opportunity to play in our school’s holiday triples tournament. Stepping onto the court for the first time in months, I found that I was less focused on the mistakes I made in the match and more focused on what I did well, considering I hadn’t played in a while. And even though we lost all four matches we played, I had fun and appreciated that I was able to play pain-free. Tennis provided me with an important life lesson. Perfection shouldn’t be the focus, and the way you handle adversity shapes your journey. Through tennis, I gained a new respect for resilience and appreciating the experience rather than focusing on my perceived imperfections. I will carry this lesson into college and beyond, where I know I can’t and won’t be perfect. Keeping a constructive mentality and learning to appreciate the positive rather than focusing on the negative will be important for me to fully embrace my learning journey and make the most of my personal growth in the future.

With a pencil in hand and a stack of notebook paper, my younger sister and I would recap Star Wars and Marvel movies through crude stick figure comics. I loved retelling my favorite parts using stick characters, adding random jokes and twists. That’s how my relationship with art began. One day, my sister created an original story with us as the main characters. Being more of a writer, she came up with the storyline and I helped bring it to life with the most emotive stick figures a 10 year old could illustrate. When we showed our dad this 50+ page “masterpiece,” his surprising response was that if we edited the story and cleaned up the illustrations, he would find a way to publish it as an ebook; so for the next four years, from 6th to 10th grade, I co-wrote and illustrated Penelope’s Adventure Club, a six-book comic series published on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Nook. Through the process I learned about storyboarding, plot, character development, collaboration, patience, and above all, it helped me realize my love for storytelling and creating different characters. During my freshman year (2021), I discovered FlipaClip, a 2D animation application. Intrigued by the idea of bringing my stick figure drawings to life, I began experimenting with animation and instantly became hooked. I started a YouTube channel to share my animations and document my progress as an artist. Watching other animators with different styles further inspired and helped me to see a broader world of drawing/animation. I took note of various techniques; I taught myself to draw beyond a stick figure and developed in anatomy, perspective, and color theory. I find that when I’m animating and exploring ways to improve, time flies by. Learning on my own was okay, but I wanted more. I wanted a live teacher, someone I could ask questions and learn from other students who shared my interest. Unfortunately, the school I was attending in Florida didn’t have an animation track, but as fate would have it, my family relocated to Texas at the start of my junior year and the school I transferred into had an animation track I was able to enroll in. Animation quickly became my favorite class. Despite being semesters behind some of my classmates, I joined a University Interscholastic League (UIL) digital animation team and our submission advanced to the quarter finals! I’m in my senior year and I’m taking both Animation 2 and 3D Modeling classes. Over the summer I learned about Blender 3D animation and our UIL animation team is finalizing our 2024-25 submission. I feel really great about what we’ve created! My goal is to lean into my passion and become a professional animator. I’m eager to dive into this field and I want to be part of a college community where I can grow, learn, and collaborate with peers with similar dreams. Ultimately, I want to have a positive impact on the world through the magic and storytelling of animation.