Comments on: Education vs Selfteaching part 2

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 09:52:12 +0000

Hey, thanks Mike. It’s good to know that there are several courses out there that are making a difference. Obviously I can’t comment on yours, but I know of two other places in the UK that are providing students with a solid background, and I know lecturers at both.

Unfortunately I still regularly see CVs and portfolios of people that have been in further education that seem to be lacking in technique.

By: Mike Porter

Mike Porter — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:00:48 +0000

While I agree there are a lot of institutions that may not help in getting you employment, I am going to plug our school. We have had a 99% success rate for our students getting work. I think the main reason is we have productions throughout the two year time frame where our students (artists and programmers) have to come together to produce a game in 4 weeks and another in 6 months. The productions are run just like a production would be run in industry and the tutors act as producers and publishers. This very directed learning helps the student to understand the nature of the industry, the amount of dedication needed to get through a production and how to negotiate changes and features within a team and to an external source. The byproduct of this is also a playable portfolio piece and their names in games that are sent to local game development studios to critique. More often than not these students are snapped up within days of their graduation ceremony.

I highly recommend really looking at the curriculum of whatever institution you are going to, make sure that industry veterans are involved with the course and make sure that you have something like a game as part of the output from your effort. The collection of images from your course work should also show demonstrate a wide skill set.

I was self taught at a time when there weren’t that many tutorials on the internet and I know there is a huge pool of knowledge out there currently. For the best results, get someone who has been in the industry to show you why something works not just how.

By: Matthew Everhart

Matthew Everhart — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:37:47 +0000

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.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:06:14 +0000

Glad you like the site, and it’s unfortunate to hear another tale of a course that may not be supplying the required teaching and information. However, the fact that you are going out of your way to learn what you feel is missing already gives you an advantage – you’ve realised more effort is required and you are putting that effort in. That can only be a good thing.

I wish you the best of luck in your job hunt! You’ve got some nice sketches on your site too.

By: Tim Ridley

Tim Ridley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:06:26 +0000

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.