How Online study at Falmouth University helped turn my hometown into my campus

This article was written by MA Graphic Design (Online) student, Dan. 

I don't find golf that interesting, but I do like graphic design.

I'd been living on the West Coast for a couple of years, having escaped city life. New life now established. A lovely home, working full-time (hybrid), two dogs and a beach on the doorstep.

I'd met people too. Dog walks, local activities, the local. The usual conversations followed. The weather. Football. Dogs. Golf!

There's a rather beautiful golf club next to the beach.

I'm here for the beach.

But it did make me wonder: is there an equivalent of a golf club if you're far more interested in graphic design?

So I started looking, but online. Communities. Workshops. Short courses. Even software courses. Somewhere to learn something new, maybe cyber-meet people with similar interests and give myself something creative to get stuck into.

Somewhere in that search, postgraduate study appeared.

An online MA in Graphic Design made sense. Flexibility, studying around work, learning from home — the promises of home study. Once championed by the Open University, but that's probably showing my age.

This might work.

But where?

That was where Falmouth came in.

I knew its reputation within art and design. I knew the famous — to me — names of some of the people who had studied there. If I was going to commit a significant amount of my spare time to making this jump, I wanted to do it somewhere I was genuinely excited to be part of.

So, no harm in applying.

I imagined online study in much the same way most people do. A lot of time behind a laptop.

There has certainly been plenty of that, but the modules had a habit of making me look away from my screen.

One investigation might send me looking for ghost signs — old painted advertisements still visible on buildings, sometimes even reappearing — but then I'd notice other things. Peculiar signs, signals and behaviours that had been sitting there all along. Quirky things that seemed to make no sense, but were just there. Permanent.

The modules weren't necessarily telling me what to find. They were encouraging me to look at the environment I already knew through a different lens.

A walk became an investigation. A record shop became somewhere to better understand how the town worked. And a gig became research into how people congregate and interact with culture.

Everything was the same.

Just more intriguing.

Then the cohort would gather again online.

Everyone had been looking, just in different places — and more often than not, in different countries — bringing their own signs, behaviours, oddities and observations with them.

Something completely ordinary in one place could be fascinatingly unfamiliar somewhere else.

The local became international.

For a moment, all those separate places occupied the same conversation.

Then we scattered again.

Back to our own streets, towns, cities and time zones — only now carrying everyone else's observations with us.

For me, that started changing conversations too.

I was producing a screen-printed zine about local live music (at a print workshop I'd only recently discovered) when I handed a copy to an interested — and interesting — acquaintance, Jack.

He spotted a fluorescent pull quote repeating the name: "Wych Elm, Wych Elm, Wych Elm."

"No way," he said. "I'm in a band called Wych Elm."

Neither of us had realised it was his band being mentioned. Charlie P, who had written the article, knew Wych Elm were local and hoped a copy might eventually find its way to them.

Turns out, it already had.

A tiny coincidence, but representative of what kept happening.

Creative conversations spiralled. Music led to coding, which led to another introduction. Record cover design led to local festival posters. Zines led to independent small-batch publishing.

One interest revealed another.

A strange posse was forming.

I wasn't consciously building a network.

I was following conversations.

Gradually, my home town became — and is — my campus.

Falmouth had somehow supercharged what was already here.

It has been challenging and demanding, which it should be. That's rather the point.

Online study does fit around an established life.

Then it starts interrupting it.

You notice something while you're out. Just something curious. You look it up. One thing leads to another. A conversation continues when you get home.

Suddenly, you're researching.

TV does become less interesting.

The course gave me reasons to look differently, ask better questions, stay for another conversation and discover interests that everyday small talk might never have reached. Some connections appeared within a few streets of home, others across a far-flung cohort.

The course had quietly made me more involved in where I already was.

And unlike a university campus I might have moved to for a couple of years, this one doesn't disappear when the course finishes.

In truth, I've still yet to visit the Falmouth campus. Hopefully graduation will change that — fingers crossed!