My Dear Richard...
Ragging on Digipen seems to be the "cool thing" now, so maybe someone wants to hear from someone who has nothing to lose.
One thing Digipen emphasizes over and over when you apply or tour is how SO MANY of their students drop out. This is of course, meant to make you assume that their program is very challenging, hardcore, and worthwhile. Only the elite, cream of the crop will graduate! It's a pretty good sell, not only does it encourage people to come in, because everyone wants to be elite, it discourages people from dropping out because it tells them that it's THEIR fault, if you're dropping out it must be either because you've become overwhelmed and hate video games now, or else you just aren't good enough, aren't smart enough.
Well, Digipen IS challenging. There's no denying that. Let's look at WHY so many students drop out:
During this semester alone, I was told that the only way, no way around it, to avoid taking summer classes was to take 7 classes in one day. SEVEN CLASSES IN ONE DAY. It almost never takes less than 20 minutes for me to log in at DP, and I've got a pretty much empty desktop. The network is always slow, and often doesn't work at all. In my math class, the book is so absolutely shitty that the teacher warned us at the beginning of the semester how shitty it is, it's practically indecipherable and often does not even cover, at all, material asked about in the homeworks (which are from the book). In another class, over half of the material "covered" in the class was simply the teacher saying, "hey, look this stuff up on the internet." One of my teachers, any time you ask for help, is downright sarcastic and insulting. In another class, we were given a ridiculously short time to gather a team and create a project, much of which we hadn't learned the material required to do, and when halfway through my entire team, every last one, dropped the class, the teacher wouldn't give me an extension or allow me to join another team because "that wouldn't be fair to the other teams." My GAM class has contained such gems as the "piracy is bad" lecture and the advice "holding down the jump button to jump higher is not intuitive, you should put that in a tutorial." Some of my classes have honestly challenging material, but most classes are only "challenging" because of the shitty teaching, or the projects and workload: I could make an arithmetic class "challenging" by not teaching you how to add or by giving you 10,000 problems a day.
That's just this semester, but it's a pretty accurate summation of any other semester I've had here, too. Why do students drop out? Well, Digipen is honestly still your bests shot at getting a job in the game industry, but it's not your ONLY shot. I'm not sure if I'm going to try to get into the industry after dropping out of DP, but I do know this: at some point, you have to make a choice between whether you think you'll be more successful with sketchy knowledge and a degree highly regarded in the industry, or another degree, which is also very possibly highly regarded, from a school that will actually teach you something. I'm not as interested in "teaching myself" things as I presume most DP graduates are, so as much as it pains me, I can't continue like this.
And still, the "dropping out because you aren't good enough thing" bothers me. I've been doing pretty well at Digipen; I'd be willing to wager pretty highly that I've been doing better than most other students. But 20% of the time I spend working at Digipen is actually applying learned knowledge to assignments or reviewing knowledge that was actually taught in class, the other 80% is dealing with Digipen bullshit, like the nonworking network, or trying to teach myself something because my teacher was too lazy to teach it to us himself. So, I'm not doing poorly... I'm just unhappy about the quality of teaching and, based on my experiences here, also unsure about whether this is an industry I want to get into. But that's not all. I've been to a community college and a university before coming to DP, and for those students who have never attended a University, you really honestly do not have an inkling of what you're missing. No, shut up, you REALLY don't know what you're missing. Administrative support, access to both teachers and tutors, extracurricular clubs and activities, the quality of classes... it's amazing how much I took these things for granted while at Kettering and how much the lack of them came crashing down at Digipen.
One thing Digipen emphasizes over and over when you apply or tour is how SO MANY of their students drop out. This is of course, meant to make you assume that their program is very challenging, hardcore, and worthwhile. Only the elite, cream of the crop will graduate! It's a pretty good sell, not only does it encourage people to come in, because everyone wants to be elite, it discourages people from dropping out because it tells them that it's THEIR fault, if you're dropping out it must be either because you've become overwhelmed and hate video games now, or else you just aren't good enough, aren't smart enough.
Well, Digipen IS challenging. There's no denying that. Let's look at WHY so many students drop out:
During this semester alone, I was told that the only way, no way around it, to avoid taking summer classes was to take 7 classes in one day. SEVEN CLASSES IN ONE DAY. It almost never takes less than 20 minutes for me to log in at DP, and I've got a pretty much empty desktop. The network is always slow, and often doesn't work at all. In my math class, the book is so absolutely shitty that the teacher warned us at the beginning of the semester how shitty it is, it's practically indecipherable and often does not even cover, at all, material asked about in the homeworks (which are from the book). In another class, over half of the material "covered" in the class was simply the teacher saying, "hey, look this stuff up on the internet." One of my teachers, any time you ask for help, is downright sarcastic and insulting. In another class, we were given a ridiculously short time to gather a team and create a project, much of which we hadn't learned the material required to do, and when halfway through my entire team, every last one, dropped the class, the teacher wouldn't give me an extension or allow me to join another team because "that wouldn't be fair to the other teams." My GAM class has contained such gems as the "piracy is bad" lecture and the advice "holding down the jump button to jump higher is not intuitive, you should put that in a tutorial." Some of my classes have honestly challenging material, but most classes are only "challenging" because of the shitty teaching, or the projects and workload: I could make an arithmetic class "challenging" by not teaching you how to add or by giving you 10,000 problems a day.
That's just this semester, but it's a pretty accurate summation of any other semester I've had here, too. Why do students drop out? Well, Digipen is honestly still your bests shot at getting a job in the game industry, but it's not your ONLY shot. I'm not sure if I'm going to try to get into the industry after dropping out of DP, but I do know this: at some point, you have to make a choice between whether you think you'll be more successful with sketchy knowledge and a degree highly regarded in the industry, or another degree, which is also very possibly highly regarded, from a school that will actually teach you something. I'm not as interested in "teaching myself" things as I presume most DP graduates are, so as much as it pains me, I can't continue like this.
And still, the "dropping out because you aren't good enough thing" bothers me. I've been doing pretty well at Digipen; I'd be willing to wager pretty highly that I've been doing better than most other students. But 20% of the time I spend working at Digipen is actually applying learned knowledge to assignments or reviewing knowledge that was actually taught in class, the other 80% is dealing with Digipen bullshit, like the nonworking network, or trying to teach myself something because my teacher was too lazy to teach it to us himself. So, I'm not doing poorly... I'm just unhappy about the quality of teaching and, based on my experiences here, also unsure about whether this is an industry I want to get into. But that's not all. I've been to a community college and a university before coming to DP, and for those students who have never attended a University, you really honestly do not have an inkling of what you're missing. No, shut up, you REALLY don't know what you're missing. Administrative support, access to both teachers and tutors, extracurricular clubs and activities, the quality of classes... it's amazing how much I took these things for granted while at Kettering and how much the lack of them came crashing down at Digipen.