…and I’m exhausted.

For those of you that don’t know anything about the Academy of Art University, it’s the largest private art school in North America, and has been around since the 1920s. That status combined with their location being in San Francisco means that they’re in bed with such big names as Apple, Pixar, Google, and Industrial Light & Magic. Many of the schools that I researched also have graduates that go on to work for those companies, but the difference is that it’s very common to find yourself in the same classes as professionals already working for those companies who are seeking to further advance their skills. Anybody can enroll, but the classes are kept very hard supposedly to keep the professionals happy and to ensure that they keep their various precious accreditations and fancy awards, but I suspect the real reason is that they just want as many lazy, spoiled brats as possible to keep paying to repeat the foundational classes. This school is out to get everybody. I can tell.

Although I am very unhappy with the workload, I am happy to say that I earned As in all of my classes.
My Sketching for Communication instructor told me fairly early on that he was pretty sure I’d get a B, and he’s not only known to be very hesitant about giving out As, but I overheard him give lots of Ds and Fs when we were presenting our finals along with our full portfolios. He said I was right on the edge of a B+ and an A-, but I managed to push him over the edge in the right direction by mentioning how much I had clearly improved and saying he knew how much time I put into everything. He thought about it for another agonizing second, and then told me that he’d have to raise another student’s grade from B+ to A- as well. Gasp. I found this to be quite agreeable.

One class that I knew for sure I’d get an A in was Computer Anatomy. It’s a required class for Digital Arts & Communications majors, which was absolutely fine by me but apparently not so fine for other people. We had a 95 point final, and I only missed one question. I got all of the extra credit questions though, so I ended up with 100/95 on it. Sweet deal.

And then there was my User Experience class. Ooooof. Our final project for that class was a group project that started like six weeks ago, and our task was to analyze and redesign Craigslist. Needless to say, my initial reports on the site served as the foundation for the analysis portion, and I ended up doing almost all of the design work. There were two other people on my team who really pulled their weight, but we were supposed to be a group of five people. Early on though, one of our teammates sent us an email suddenly that explained that she had to go back to Africa because of some type of emergency and that she wouldn’t be coming back, and another guy in the group just didn’t really get his stuff done, and when he did, another teammate and I had to clean up after him. The project is over now though, and the final product was great. The designated team leader and I presented it, and we got As. The instructor even told us we should send it to Craigslist just to see what they had to say.

Next semester, I’ll be taking Internet Design 1, Fundamentals of Graphic Design, and Materials, Tools, and Comping Techniques. After hearing other people already taking those classes moan all semester about all the work they had, I definitely do not expect to get all As again next semester. I’m just going to try not to think about next semester. I’m just happy to be home until late January!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under All Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.