Georgia Piedmont Technical College

Date: Jul 20 2014
Major: Unknown (This Major's Salary over time)
I went to take a '3D modeling' certificate program. The teacher constantly referred to us as 'professionals' and talked about 'our clients' saying we were basically Ad design professionals, three classes in before we had even touched any software and expected 'professional grade work.' Keep in mind that everyone in the class was taking wildly different paths, and this course was just a pre-requisite. We then spent about a third of the entire semester waiting for the IT guys to properly install software on some new computers. About 80% of the way through the first class we discovered there's actually part A and B to this class (which is listed nowhere on the site, still isn't, even after somebody specifically told us 'woops it?s not there, our bad') That also resulted in about half of the class spending half a class registering for part B because we had no way of knowing from our individual courses. The "classes" consisted of flipping through extremely bland PowerPoint slides that were made three hours before class. I know they were made about three hours before class because apparently suggesting we go to a website (that were suggested based on a google search they did) after class for a "full explanation" of the topic they were skimming over is legit, and to show us the website they put a screen cap of her ENTIRE screen, including the clock, all the site tabs open, and the google search tab, watermarking it for three hours before class. I don't really think I should be learning about Photoshop from someone who can't crop a screenshot. Before almost every tool we learned about (we learned the most basic tools and most often used the class before the final project was due, I'm not joking) they would say "Oh wow they changed this since I last used the software" which implies they haven?t touched the software in years, and during class was the proper time for one to re-acquaint themselves with the software. My favorite demonstration was trying to show off some complex reflecting tool, and the shape they decided to use was a circle. Funniest part was it took them until they had actually applied the mirror to realize it was pointless. We hopped wildly between Photoshop techniques and our writing abilities (for a digital design class, what?) in a completely random subjective fashion. I discussed at length with at least 3 classmates who could not figure out the teachers grading scale at all. People had gotten good grades on things they didn't care about and threw together last minute, and received low grades on projects they actually put effort into. Grades always came as a number and an explanation. My favorite was for the first thing I actually liked the look of and made sense for the topic. I received an 80 and the explanation was 'You clearly fully understand Photoshop, but this picture is missing something, and I?m not sure what it is though.' Other grades consisted of completely subjective points of view, instead of actually analyzing understanding of the topics at hand. At this point I abandoned all rational reasoning. My final project I threw together in class literally hours before it was due, because up until that point I had put effort varying from a lot to way too much for this class, and received 70-85's with no real logic. I received a 95 on my final project that looked extremely simple and made barely any sense. Time spent confirmed inversely proportional to grade.

To top everything off, I also learned they failed to list four other classes required for the certificate, and are still not visible on their website. It was the same teacher teaching the actual modeling classes; if you can't handle the relatively simple program Photoshop, I can't imagine how a 3D modeling class would go.

DO NOT TAKE ANY OF THEIR NEWER GRAPHIC DESIGN COURSES, THEY PUT ZERO PLANNING INTO IT AND DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TEACHERS (the teacher?s favorite excuse)