Any other students dealing with overly harsh and expensive curriculums?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>I'm not sure how harsh art students have it at schools that aren't just "art schools" but it seems to me like the top art schools in the US get a kick out of making their curriculums unnecessarily brutal, especially freshman foundation year. Whenever you ask a freshman art student here about how their social life is so far, the general consensus is, "LOL. You actually think we have time for a social life? What kind of crack are YOU on?" Thankfully I'm a writing major so I have it easier than most of the other kids at my school (Pratt), but I have one art elective, and it's such a time sucker I seriously pity anyone having to take six full courses like that. The art classes here are six to eight hours long (which as you can imagine sucks when you have more than one in a day) and the pile of homework the teachers give seems to imply that they believe we don't ever need to eat, bathe, or sleep.</p>

<p>Architecture students have it the worst out of anyone (the nickname for their major "architorture"). They're practically nonexistent. My roommate is an architecture major and out of the whole month and a half we've been here, she's slept in our room maybe two full nights. The rest of the time she's either in class, doing homework, napping for about half an hour, and then heading back to the lab at like two in the morning to finish more work and stay there for like eight, ten hours at a time. Whenever I see her, she's threatening to kill herself if the work doesn't ease up. The architecture teachers actually tell their students to just bring sleeping bags to their studio in order to have to avoid walking to and from their dorms, because it's a "waste of time."</p>

<p>Not only is the workload ridiculous, but it seems like they think we're all millionaires. My elective teacher expects us to waste two 100-page sketchbooks per class. So, excluding the expenses of pencils, erasers, paper, rulers, paint, and other supplies, that's like $30 per class if you manage to find some cheap ones. And then there are ridiculously overpriced products on our mandatory lists, such as Color-Aid, which is a box full of small construction paper that costs $150, and which we'll probably use maybe twice.</p>

<p>It's like the school's motto is to basically either do a good job in your classes and end up looking like a corpse by the end of the year or to just screw it, get bad grades, and basically make the *****load of money we spend on tuitions be a complete waste.</p>

<p>Anybody else having this experience?</p>

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<p>at least you got into a good school</p>

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<p>Maybe they’re trying to “weed out” prospective art majors?</p>

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<p>i think it’s just the way it is with all art majors. i go to a liberal arts school, but an art major was telling me just yesterday how ridiculously expensive and time consuming all of her classes are. i’m a music student, and i can tell you it’s the same deal with us, despite not being at a conservatory right now. i can honestly say that since starting college (only a year ago) i’ve spent several thousand dollars on specialty books, plus an extra 1000 or so on repairs and cleaning of my instrument as well as rental/purchasing of other instruments and music. oh yeah, and a conducting baton that sucks so i need to buy a new, better one. it’s just a fact of life you have to deal with.</p>

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<p>Did you carefully check out the curriculum before enrolling?</p>

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<p>Eh, I’m just experiencing some angst because I’m in an honors program and as such I have to take a handful of honors courses that have NOTHING to do with my major. I feel like they’re eating up my schedule one class at a time, preventing me from taking classes that I want to :(. Granted, the scholarship is nice but still…</p>