» Canadian Universities Have Terrible Information Design
I’m looking at film programs to attend: VFS, SFU, UBC, Emily Carr, USC, UCLA, NYU, etc. The Canadian schools have fucking terrible websites.
I wanted to know how much a year of film costs at SFU and the closest I could get, after dozens of clicks, is that it’s approx. $160 per credit. Credits per workshop times workshops per year? Snooore. I’ve already lost interest. It was easier to find out how much their UPass cost.
I’d like to end up in the MFA program at UCLA. The easiest route seems to be to get into an interactive entertainment MFA here and then do the exchange student thing.
This all seems so expensive as well. Why spend $250,000, or even $35,000 on what amounts to some technical training and a string of networking events when you can just spend that making a film?
How can you determine what school to attend or how much it should cost when you don’t even have an answer to that question?! See also: performance measurement
Jared
5 Nov 09 at 3:13 pm
All schools teach roughly the same stuff: Big-O is big-O everywhere. The difference lies in the people you meet: Math students at UVic are not math students at Waterloo. VFS teaches continuity editing the same as UCLA, but you won’t bump into Scorsese there.
Film degrees also have value in BC — the government won’t fund films unless the person applying has been to a recognized school. In that regard it makes sense to jump the hurdle quickly and cheaply and then start filling out grant applications.
The “technical” side of the art is interesting to me as well. Reading and practicing on my own is helping, but not as much as a knowledgeable critic would. It would be fun to try to pay for film school by selling photographs taken using film school equipment and training.
Jack
5 Nov 09 at 3:31 pm
I know that you said “roughly the same”, which gives you some wiggle room here, but I disagree that the only substantive differences between most schools is who you meet and the contacts you can make.
I’ve been interviewing some 4th-year students lately for co-op positions, and been disappointed about the courses that they’re not being taught. One student at UBC was taking his first course on parallel programming, and it sounded like a very solid course, but it was a graduate-level course that he was taking on his own initiative. A student that I work with, who is going back to finish his fourth year at York, asked for advice about which CS courses he should take: Operating Systems was one of his options in 4th-year!
Yes, if you want to learn how to program, you can learn that at any of these schools but, then again, you would probably be better off going to a good technical college if that’s all you wanted to learn.
Don
6 Nov 09 at 12:06 pm
Very fair point Don. I was trying to be glib. Maybe I should have said something along the lines of “schools don’t teach esoteric knowledge”. While curricula differ, Waterloo doesn’t teach you Secret Computer Science — as far as I know (“welcome to ‘P Equals NP 101′ — here’s how to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in O(n) time”).
The idea, the original example I was generalizing, comes from business school: Harvard and UVic, for example, teach “roughly” the same business classes. Because of publish-or-die Harvard might get information earlier because of its lecturers — Drucker could tell you what he dreamed up over breakfast yesterday — but it eventually all leaks out into the “information market” through publishing and review. There’re no esoteric Harvard Business School economic models — as far as I know (“welcome to ‘Real Economics 101′ — here’s how to perfectly balance capital allocations in a global market”).
The difference, as it was explained to me, is that you’re much less likely to befriend a future President of America in Victoria than in Boston.
Jack
6 Nov 09 at 6:29 pm
Oh, it’s a professional degree: why didn’t you say so?
Operating systems is definitely esoteric Computer Science. It’s almost completely dead as a field of research. Any recent innovations in operating systems were made by programmers with no influence from their curriculum. But there are so few programmers working on operating systems that there’s no reason why students should take the courses. An esoteric company like RIM should expect to have to train them on the job.
Jared
7 Nov 09 at 9:50 pm
I just got schooled!
Don
9 Nov 09 at 8:27 am