Philadelphia University

First off, my ratings were an average of my views, and my roomates views. I am an animation major, he is an architect major. My first semester i had a great design teacher, who was very knowledgable, and from university of the arts. I had an incredible amount of work, more than the architects, but i learned as much as physically possible within the 14 weeks. I have had previous art experience, and was hoping to be challenged in my major. Yet being an computer animation major, i dont start classes on the computer until junior year, and by then, i will have had only 7 art classes and 13 liberal arts classes. My gpa was ruined when i recieved a C+ in Calc 1 my first semester, which the requirement for my major is only precalc, so i skipped finite, precalc, and intro to calc, and by second semester i will have taked calc 2, so there is no reason i should have to be in that class, considering i never took calc in high school. Then i met with the poorly designed animation department, who none of which know exactly what is going on, and just put the animation majors into the same first year courses as fashion design. If you are a design student and you want to learn design, and be challenged with hard workers, this is not the place for you, the students complain whenever a little bit of work is given, and the school favors athletes. An athelete in my hall had shot a girl with a paintball gun, was caught with cocaine in his room, and trashed the halls, and his punishment was to be moved to a different hall. Most of the design students are not artists, they "like to shop" so they majored in fashion. And the animation majors "like to play video games" so they thought it would be cool to make them. --- That was all my view of it. But my roomate is very happy here, he is an architect and has alot of work, which he likes because he is learning. The good thing about architect major is that people drop out and get failed out if they cannot handle the work, if you want to major in architecture this is a fine school

1st Year Male -- Class 2010

Campus Aesthetics: A, Social Life: F

If you're going into the field of architecture be prepared to have no life. You do about 1 project every 1.5-1.7 weeks. A project usually consists of a ton of work followed by the professor pointing out everything you do wrong for 5-10 minutes straight depending on his time left in class. Now, it's pretty hilarious when he's picking on everyone else, but if you're going to do architecture make sure you can handle a little bit of vocal harassment. SOOOO the first project for a first year student is a shoe model. This includes takeing a shoe, and making 15-20 perfect sketches every 3/4s inch or so. You take the sketches and figure out on your own how to transfer the sketches to the 1/8 inch cardboard. you then have to take the cardboard and since my shoe was 13 inches long, I had to make a 13 inch shoe out of 1/8 inch perfectly cut slices. That's 104 slices. They make you do the first one in a night or 2 so you will stay up all night. You wont sleep. Then the next day they gave us 5 days to do 3 more shoes with different orientations and make 3 20x30 boards with all of the sketches drawn and inked. It's a tough major and many of you guys I assume will cry often.

As for advice, use the tutoring staff. They're good people and are a lot of help. Like my calc teacher speaks so-so english and always stands right in front of what he's writing. So all I have to do is walk into this room at 12ish and write my name on a paper to show that the tutor lady is getting people.All in all, even though the Design class is really really tough they do teach you a lot about art. Like they'll find a mistake and say its like that for the purpose of the design. You then have to figure out what a good excuse is for that. Not an excuse as in the knife slipped and I cut the board to far, but a very creative excuse that I can't think of right now.

1st Year Male -- Class 2011

Innovation: A+, Social Life: C-