Paula Wallace is the Reason These Art Kids Today Mean Business (via FastCo)
As someone about to head down to Savannah to walk across the stage to get a piece of paper, seeing this interview with Paula Wallace - conducted by Fast Company - was certainly interesting and enlightening.
In 30 years, Wallace has managed to increase the school’s population, both in the states and abroad, as well as expand to 104 degree programs. Not too shabby for a school that’s younger than most of its professors. As an ‘art school’ goes, its got a pretty high employment rate after graduation. While SCAD doesn’t require internships like other schools do, our students are still hired quite readily.
However, Wallace seems to only mention the industrial design and the fashion schools; these majors are on their way to become the poster children of SCAD. Don’t get me wrong, I love that I was a part of the industrial design community at SCAD (and without it, I wouldn’t be moving across the country for a job), but readers should remember that there are (102) other majors at SCAD. ID and fashion are very different from a lot of the majors offered; the mindset is very different and the jobs accepted and offered are worlds apart.
According to the article, art history and other liberal arts classes make up the strong foundation SCAD students are given. As Wallace says, students have to understand “what’s come before to be strong link” in the design world. Its a little confusing to read this, as classes such as history of Industrial Design no longer exist, and as far as I can tell, most students don’t rank their art history classes as #1 most influential classes. I’m not saying that the art history faculty is bad - on the contrary, I enjoyed my art history classes (all 3 of them that I had to take) very much. The teachers were all of a very high caliber and the material covered was interesting. Yet I don’t think that it provided as much of a foundation as is cited in this article; I know so many students who take the art history just because they ‘have to’. I took a survey of furniture class as an elective and I’m pretty sure it was one of the best classes I took here at SCAD. Can there be more classes like that? Please?
Wallace talks about the preparation students get for the ‘real world’; having implemented this preparation first hand last summer, I do agree with her point. I was able to be integrated into a professional setting seamlessly, while never letting go any of my education. I’d like to see how students of different majors react to this article, as well as students who’ve had a hard time finding a job out of school.
