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 p.1 #11 · Four year colleges with good Photography programs | |
flyfishcamera wrote:
Hopefully I am in the right forum.
My son will graduate from high school in 2010. He's looking at colleges.
In high school he has been taking lots of photos for the yearbook, student newspaper, etc. and wants to explore a Photography degree in a four year college. To date he's looking at specific schools Pratt and Brooks. He's also looing at traditional programs (choice of photojournalism or fine arts photography) Ohio University and Western Kentucky.
Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
UNC-CH might not be a bad choice, especially if he is into sports (he could easily find himself shooting players who have won gold medals or national championships in a wide array of sports and the local sports pros and official school photographers are all very nice and helpful). But the sports angle is just a bonus, I don't at all mean to make it sound as if though it's primarily a sports PJ program, not at all.
I've seen students get sent on amazing PJ trips to Asia, Europe, South America, etc. and it seems like students have pretty good success at getting internships while they are here, whatever their focus.
Furthermore, when I was shooting sports, I noticed that at quite a few events quite a few pros (working for various newspapers, Getty, etc.) were former UNC students. At times, it seemed like very other person at the ACC basketball champs had been in some way associated with the school  , maybe that is a little exaggerated, but there were certainly a lot.
The students seem to do pretty well in the regional and even national PJ contests.
There is a pretty major school newspaper too (very large circulation daily) and the yearbook provides lots of opportunities as well. I mean really great opportunities (though a few of the photo people have tended to be overly clique-ish and defensive, to put it diplomatically, the last two years about ever letting students who are not actually officially in the School of Journalism program itself from ever getting to be in positions higher than general staff, but that probably wouldn't affect him and, regardless of any of that, just as a regular staff member, he could pick up tons of great experience and get 100% support doing the regular stuff. It really is a great opportunity and he could quite probably get more experience there as general staff member than he could as head photo editor at most other school papers.)
They also seem to be covering multimedia/internet skills now too. It appears as if everyone needs to also produce a full video project and create a custom website with slideshows and so on and that they don't soley focus on pure stills.
Really the only bad thing is if he has allergies. It is a savage part of the country for anyone with those sorts of issues....
Anyway, I was never part of the photography program itself so I can only comment a bit from the outside, but the program appears to be pretty well liked by the students and seems to provide good networking, they get internships at major papers, National Geographic, etc. OTOH, I guess sometimes people say it can be better to be a big fish in a small pond and this is a big pond, but i'm not sure, with how badly journalism is doing these days (really do hear pretty grim stories....), that small pond would give enough connections (certainly in many fields merely being skilled really doesn't appear to me to be enough to make easy progress)??
But do more research, I've only just barely dabbled at the edges of this field so there are surely better people to talk to than myself.
(you can look at the US News type reports too they might work better for stuff like this, but at least in terms of general undergrad rankings, which granted is not the point at hand, I think it is safe to say their methodology leaves something to be desired and looking at individual rankings like say 2 vs 3 or 15 vs 25 is rather nonsense IMO for a variety of reasons, maybe taking schools in bunches of 15 or 30 it makes some sense in some ways though).
Edited on Apr 12, 2009 at 12:36 PM · View previous versions
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