Hao Chen Review of Academy of Art
Due to its private status and located at downtown ...
Due to its private status and located at downtown San Francisco, the tuition fee is high, charged by class units.
The school covers a broad breadth of art fields, from architecture to fashion design. Some majors have better instructors while some are not as deep.
Although classes are expensive, but quite many classes is one hour instruction per class unit each week during regular semesters. The rest would be included lab times. If you live near or inside San Francisco, lab times are useful. If not or taking online classes, too bad.
Admission isn't difficult at all, especially for undergraduate. Basically you apply and you get in. For master level, a little bit more difficult, but could be nearly as easy, depending on majors.
Classes are small sized, usually less than 20 and often less than 10. However, three hour instruction time per week is short. Especially in many classes, instructors need to check students' progresses (duh, it is an art school, students got to make "something"), commenting and suggesting, sometimes more than half of instruction hours would be spent on that, leaving little time for new materials.
Thesis-production is the fun part -- for graduate students. In many other school or fields, theses = papers, and quite often useless papers. At the Academy, it is about producing an art work that could impress the faculty enough to grant you the major and graduation. One could fail to pass the midpoint (thesis proposal) and final evaluation multiple times, before graduating. It is the most fun and challenging part of a graduate study experience there.
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