It's a bit like playing jazz, or dancing en pointe. If you're doing it right, it really hurts. I had a miserable time, thanks for asking, but I needed to stop making the work someone told me to make, and do the work I needed to do myself. I arrived and quickly found out that nobody knew a thing about my work, or really cared. Then I set out to invest two years in taking apart How I Do What I Do, looking it over, and then seeing if I could put it back together again.
Ideas are cheap.
I come up with zillions of ideas every day. The tricky part is how I decide which ideas I'll work on. So I made a list of all the reasons I used to reject ideas , and then I set out to break 'em all and see which ones still seemed valid. This process was the basis and source for most of my work in my graduating exhibition. I met some good people.