 Foundation School of Art and Design in Media Practice is a one-year program, two semesters, and it serves as the foundation for a series of skills that young designers and young artists need and want to explore in the future. It serves also as a starting point for their bachelor program inside Prague City University, fine art, graphic design and creative media, as well as any other university all around the world. Foundation is split into two parts, the exploratory phase and the conformatory phase. Semester one, semester two, let's put it like that. The exploratory phase is the part in which students try no matter what. They explore different topics, techniques, tools. There's one class in particular, which is called media experimentation, which is a set of 10 different workshops, two weeks each, where students try what graphic, what Adobe Photoshop is, what sculpture means, what interactive art is. The second part, the conformatory phase, is the part where students realize, hopefully, what they want and they confirm their choice, their decision, and they prepare their portfolio. During the conformatory and the exploratory phase, there's a set of, I believe, six different classes. There is a purely theoretical class, which is, by the way, the only class that repeats both in the exploratory phase and in the conformatory phase, which is contextual studies. Contextual studies is art and design history, and I believe it's the backbone of the program. If you want to be a young designer or a young artist, you have to look around you before you make your move. The reasons why students decide foundation, this goal for foundation are many, but mostly it's because of two possible needs. Either they know exactly what they want or they have no idea what they want. Either they know it and they want to develop those skills, which are useful to them. Let's assume they want to become young designers and they want to improve knowledge of Adobe software. In that case, foundation helps them developing it. Or they have no idea, and they have just a general interest towards creativity, and they come to foundation because they want to find out what is the real need in their head. Any student is suitable for the program. We have students of different ages, and they have different reasons for being at foundation. There's no requirements, so this means they don't need to have a portfolio to enter foundation. There is probably just one requirement, which I believe is very important, which is sincere curiosity towards art design and creative media, because I believe without that foundation could be a total nightmare because it's extremely intensive. The Friday show is a series of shows that happen at the end of each of these workshops on Fridays, and it's an opportunity for students to show the results of their work in each of these workshops to each other and to people outside the environment of the school. The Friday shows happen here and at the same time on social media on Fadum Instagram page. The final major project is the last step, is the last action, is the last project, and it's the longest one. This is probably its main value. Students work for a full semester onto their final exhibition, which means they work for months on it, researching, planning, experimenting, creating, installing, promoting their final show. So probably the main value is its length. After this long set of mini projects, which culminates with all these Friday shows, this is the longest one, and it's the final one. The results of this final exhibition together with, of course, the results of the students' portfolio are the elements according to which then students are rated. As a program leader, I follow students a little bit. There's a class I'm teaching in semester one, for example, which is called Choosing a Pathway, and it's a class that repeats every week, and it's the moment in which workshop after workshop I meet students and I somehow look for conclusions to it. So Choosing a Pathway is one of these opportunities where I am trying to help them choosing, understanding, and then choosing what's good for them. Not only within Traxity University, but also in case students want then to move abroad or to some other university, then choosing a pathway, my role is there to help them understanding requirements in their new choice. Foundation is a transition. Foundation looks like a station is a place where people go to go somewhere else. The results that students have after foundation change a lot depending on their choice. Some of them continue here, they continue in a bachelor program inside Traxity University, some of them move far away, some of them go to study in Sweden, go back to Japan or United States, and somehow some of them come back. It's a strange curiosity perhaps, but at the moment I believe three foundation lecturers used to be foundation students. Students after foundation leave, yes sure, with a new confidence, which depends on the amount of skills, the new skills they build, they leave with their diploma, which allows them to go wherever they want, and they leave with a well-built portfolio, and they leave with a big nostalgia for foundation makers.