Kelly Wergin is a Department Chair for Full Sail's Game Art bachelor’s program. She not only has 19 years of experience teaching Full Sail students, but she’s also a three-time Full Sail grad and has found herself consistently drawn to the school since learning about it from Hall of Fame inductee Jack Geckler.

“I moved to Florida to go to the University of Central Florida, and within the first month of arriving I met Jack Geckler. We started talking about what I enjoy doing, and he was like, ‘What are you doing at UCF? Come to Full Sail,’” Kelly explains. “I took a tour of the school, fell in love with it, and started the Computer Animation associate degree.”

Kelly also holds a Computer Animation bachelor’s degree as well as a Game Design master’s degree. ­Her time as both a Full Sail student and instructor has taught Kelly that her real passion lies in fixing game assets – not making them.

“I just love troubleshooting, which is what I do in my current Game Production course. It's troubleshooting design, troubleshooting implementation, critiquing, and troubleshooting the art in a technical way,” Kelly shares.

Kelly got her first taste of complex troubleshooting when she worked on the game The Loneliest Artist, where she stepped in after the bulk of the game was already designed.

“My job was to pretty much clean up the artwork. Visually it was beautiful, but on the technical side of it, it was a disaster,” she laughs. “I absolutely loved cleaning all of that up and making things more efficient.”

At Full Sail, Kelly finds herself learning every day while working with her students’ artwork.

“Having to troubleshoot my students' artwork is a huge learning experience for me,” she begins. “I have to figure out how they got there, what’s gone wrong, and then how I can fix it. And that has helped me learn more about the tools and the programs than I ever could creating my own art.”

As an instructor, Kelly works hard to keep her students motivated and interested since she began teaching exclusively online.

“Trying to make the meetings and the lectures that I have more interesting and more interactive via Zoom was something that I had to figure out.”

Kelly has integrated a weekly self-evaluation form and a peer shoutout system that encourages her students to stay present and self-reflective throughout her course. She’s also pulled out a secret weapon: her infectious positivity.

“If I'm excited, they're excited.”