Offer for a Place!

[medusa]

Teaching to the test kills any depth or understanding of subject and curiosity.

^this x 10

I had a student yell at me because she failed an assessment that she was paying for this qualification and how dare I fail her. students don't just expect to be spoon fed now, they want to be entertained and ensured they will pass. It's all about 'retention and achievement'. It is actually almost impossible to fail a student these days which isn't a problem if they are doing an arts or humanities degree, but if they are doing life-changing stuff like social work, medicine or law it is frightening.[/rant]

[KarolinaMoon]

Thanks for this Medusa....It has made me think about the realities of doing this degree.
I do indeed already have a degree in something unrelated to jewellery ( I had at one stage wanted to be a social worker!). That was many years ago...so I am probably forgetting all the writing and studying that comes with a degree.
I have accepted the offer....but I have to admit I am still a bit unsure.

yeah, but you don't get half-term off which can be a problem with school-age children.

I'm (finally) in the home run of a 10 year career as a student which has included a few years of lecturing on a vocational degree when I was doing post-grad study and I am consequently a bit exhausted with it all, so my perspective is a tad jaundiced.

I think it is worth weighing up the financial costs of going the academic route as opposed to the practice route. 6 years of fees at £2.5-£4.5k per annum plus loss of earnings, could buy a lot of personal tuition/training and/or equipment for self-employment start up.

A degree by nature, even an applied arts one, has an academic component. You will need to research and write essays to a good standard. This is great if you are naturally a bit bookish and enjoy writing, but if you are more practice orientated it can be frustrating and can become difficult. Despite media reports of the academy 'dumbing down', it is still a huge demand on time and if the course is a good one (and there is no point if it's a mediocre one), then the staff will be on your back to hand in and get your grades up on the academic side

Part time degrees are not neatly compartmented. You ~will~ spend more than half your time working on this. They should more accurately be called ⅔ time degrees.

What kind of contact time will you have with your lecturers? If it is 10 minutes of attention per day in a workshop, is that going to be valuable to you? What will the non-workshop time consist of and what is the ratio?

What is the caliber of lecturers and support/technical staff? Are you going to be paying out for uninspiring and mediocre teaching or do the lecturers inspire you?

Do you want to break new ground design-wise or improve and perfect skills? Will you be able to make use of the networking opportunities that arise if you have to do paid work and look after kids?

Finally can you actually sustain 6 years of study plus working? The drop out rate for part time students is pretty high for a reason. It's hard to maintain work/life/study balance and the thing which costs the most and is least urgent tends to get dropped. I can't recall if you said if you already had a degree, but if you haven't, then financially and practically it would make sense to do it full-time if you really think that this degree will be beneficial to you.

The plus side is that you will have opportunities to make some amazing and useful contacts and you will get a good grounding in business set up and marketing etc and it could take your design into new and exciting areas. It could also be the springboard to an absolutely stellar career in jewellery design. I know there are people out there who didn't take the design degree route who are fabulous designers, but I think the kind of connections and opportunities a degree offers can accelerate that.
[/Eeyore]

[medusa]

embrace it and squeeze every opportunity from it. Ignore the miserable hits like me

ETA: gotta love autocorrect's loathing of mild profanity!