The School of Visual Arts

Date: Aug 23 2007
Major: Design Arts - Industrial Design/Graphic Design/etc (This Major's Salary over time)
I spent about two years at SVA in their advertising/graphic design departments and I will say that the first year advertising curriculm (in 2003-2004) taught me a lot, and was a very memorable and fun year. But the summer semester and fall semester I took when I transfered back was a joke. The "Design Lab" only has two color printers for the entire graphic design, advertising, and illustration departments, a large format printer, and four computers that occassionaly crash. There are a few computer labs but they are only equipped with b&w printers and are usually reserved for classes. Some of my teachers were recent graduates of SVA and were teaching to pay the rent, apparently what they had gone to school for was not bring in the cash. There are some well-known graphic designers and artist teaching there but their classes fill up very quickly and most of them didn't go to SVA (the most successful teacher was self-taught).

I realized I was doing mostly busy work and shallow weekly projects; my work was actually getting worse the longer I was there and I found myself conforming to the teacher's design prefrences (a majority of students did this to get a higher grade). The last straw was when I enrolled in a book making class and every week the teacher had us sit in a circle and talk -not critics, just conversations- leaving about an hour to buy supplies, have lunch and do some half-assed projects completely unrelated to book making.