Education vs Selfteaching part 2
After reading a recent article about a graduate not being able to get a job (and the resulting furore surrounding it), I thought I should revisit my short post on Education vs Self teaching. Previously I had had stated that I thought education was becoming more relevent (but not there yet), and I still stand by that.
However by revisiting this in light of Brian Nathanson’s article and after looking at his portfolio I thought there were some others things worth mentioning. Brian didn’t seem to have a portfolio – he had a collection of images, some of which were based on his coursework at college. The truth is that a university education isn’t there to build a portfolio for you, it’s there to teach you how to use the software via a series of assignments. You get an understanding of how everything works, but the finished works are not relevant to a portfolio. In much the same way I learned French at school (with a passing grade), but I wouldn’t use my French homework on my CV to get myself a job as a translator.
As Adam Bromell said, you have to throw away everything you have done on your course and create your own portfolio using the TECHNIQUES you have learned. That’s the real reason you went to the class.
Tags: game art, portfolios
September 24th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I just wanted to share my perspective since I am in this situation now. I’m grinding on my portfolio trying to get it to a professional level by my graduation date(Dec 2008) from a local University. I’ve had to jump through a lot of hoops to get, what I thought was, a basic education. This involved taking a lot of independent study classes and classes that I thought were practically useful (figure drawing).
Basically I’m trying to get the degree (I see this as a requirement on many job listings) and do the actual learning on my own. The only downside to this is my time gets really tight with school, work, and personal study and it can get very stressful at times. We are fortunate to live in a time with so much information available to us, there really is no excuse to not take advantage of it.
Sorry for the huge rant, this is a really cool site btw.
September 24th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
December 4th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I’m yet another student in this akward position. While I sit here anwsering questions for my spanish final exam, I cant help but feel like I would rather be generating normal maps from high poly models (or reading more articles on your site, which has taken up a good prtion of the last 2 hours).
Another problem with many art programs at large universities is that they see themselves as educating the next generation of avant garde artists, and to that end provide very shoddy instruction when it comes to craft, and mounds of instruction on theroy. They try and set up each student to become the next Jackson Pollock, but fail to realize there was only one of him, and that the rest of his comrades needed to be good at representing something real and tangible with paint, rather than abstractly showing how they feel with it. Critques tend to be about why you did something, not how well you actually executed it. This is probably different at pure art schools, but this has been my expirence with my top 10 American University .
Anyway, I could rant all day about this. I’m loving the articles though, thanks a lot for the inside look.