Charles Moreland

I started at RIT in the Fine Arts program with a concentration in sculpture. By my third year I realized there was so much more that I wanted to do in life and switched into the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies (CMS). This move allowed me to finish my last year in Anatomy and Physiology.

By the end of my time at RIT, I didn't entirely know what I wanted out of life at this point but I knew I wasn't meant for a typical career or a regular 9 to 5 job. I’m extremely independent and I feel the need to do everything myself. I had been thinking about self-employment for a while, I just didn’t know how I was going to apply myself.

In 2007, when I was starting my second year at RIT, I started the Rochester Parkour community (RocPK) with my roommate Zachary Cohn. We had originally tried to create an RIT recognized club, but weren’t in a place for that to happen. After graduating, I realized how much I enjoyed Rochester and the amount of hard work I had put into RocPK was too much for me to walk away from. I felt like I wasn’t done yet.

In 2011, I opened the Rochester Parkour Gym in an old Kodak plant downtown. We teach the art of movement, or parkour, and help assist in getting people excited about moving again. My art concentration helped me develop an artist’s eye for the world around me and my science concentration forces me to question and test my methods. I believe the two to be a powerful combination.

CMS allowed me to combine two different methods of cognition - the artistic and the analytical. I like being the hybrid and it allows me the benefit of drawing from both thought processes with every decision I make. I feel like a more rounded and capable person because of this.

From the moment I sat down in Michelle Firnstein’s office I knew I was in the right place. CMS allowed me the grace of deciding what classes would influence and shape my thinking and made me the ultimate decider of what I would do and how I would apply myself. Had I known about CMS from the beginning, I would have chosen this program right away.