devilmouse posted:
As someone that's had the pleasure of interviewing/working with far too many people... (Blah blah over generalizations, stereotypes...)

For programming (and god help us all, "design"), Full Sail turns out pretty weak candidates, though if they're not working on mission/performance critical systems and you give them a ton of oversight, they can be alright. Digipen's programmers tend to be much better, for whatever reason. The difference in a CS major and a trade schooler is scary. The CS majors tend to be able to think abstractly about problems and concepts while the trade school folk get panicky if they can't apply some drilled in rote memorization solution from a book. There's a pretty sharp distinction between computer PROGRAMMERS (trade schools) and ENGINEERS.

For art proper (not animation or tech art- which, again, seem to turn out alright... perhaps because these are both skill sets you can learn? There are precious few animators these days that are classically trained.), the trade schools are abysmal. The best artists I've worked with all went to traditional art schools (RISD, MICA, etc) and they blow away their trade school counterparts.

In both cases, the trade school people have this odd primadonna / entitlement complex about them. "I got my degree in making games, so obviously I know things!" At RISD, kids would be regularly be reduced to tears in crits and profs would bluntly tell them that they might want to change majors / drop out. Learning to take criticism seems absent from the trade schoolers and when you're working on the bottom of a totem pole, the last thing you want to do is to pout about not being taken seriously enough (artists with <1 year experience throwing a hissy fit when not being allowed to texture/model characters... programmers wanting to rewrite large swaths of the engine because 'that's how Unreal does it'...).

If you're going to drop some stupid amount of money on a school, make it a real one and get a proper education, not some "accredited" "certificate". Or just take free classes online at MIT or hook up with some modders and build something or hang out on cgtalk and get crits to build up a portfolio on your own.


The art schools around here all have pretty strong ties with the game shops and the game companies have intern/co-op opportunities pretty consistently. Everyone wins with these... the students get experience and the companies get cheap labor. If there's a match, then a job offer can quickly follow.

edit to be less of a dick: I have worked with great people that went to Full Sail/Digipen/etc, but these are far from the norm.