Back in 2006, someone was persuaded to give a last-minute place on a degree course to a mature student. It does happen: these days there are at least one, maybe two of us in every class of 30 or more teens. If you’re thinking about doing a photography degree, or an arts foundation course, or maybe you already have a place for this autumn, don’t hesitate, go for it.
Fourteen Tips for Your Interview
1. It’s never too late. Most of these courses are desperate for your money, and they like eager mature students, thinking they add a certain amount of moral levelling to the cohort. Whether we do or not, you can apply right up to the start date, and often after, even up to the end of the first term.
2. Don’t bother about UCCA, that’s largely for school leavers. Although you will have a form to fill in it will be a miniature version, because you’ll do it after you’ve been accepted.
3. Search the University or College course you’re interested in, find the name of the course leader and phone and/or email them directly, asking about a place. Be prepared for a few brief questions over the phone, and have your diary ready and empty. If you’re reading this, you’re probably going to be keen enough to be offered an interview.
4. Prepare thoroughly, as for any job interview. Be knowledgeable about the school’s previous successful students, about the tutors’ own work and interests. Google them if you don’t already know, find their book(s) in the library, look up their exhibitions, form an opinion about their work. You went to their end of year student degree show, yes? Find someone who did and ask about the high and lowlights.
5. Organise your professional website or blog, pushing entries about your shattered love life down in favour of a couple of intelligent reviews of work you’ve seen recently or previews of your own projects. For a fine art foundation course, cinema reviews, crafty ideas and photos of art in progress are all good blog fodder.
6. Get into a darkroom and make some prints from scratch, using basic black & white chemistry. Don’t get all arty, just some work that shows you can process film, you can print using dodge and burn, and that it’s straight and clean.
7. Make a portfolio of your best work, assembled in themes. This doesn’t need to be expensive or fancy. A4 prints in some clear acetate sleeves in a stationary ring binder will be fine for undergraduate interviews. Three or four themes will be enough: a series of landscapes, some portraits, some using indoor ambient light. A strong documentary series is always impressive, so if you haven’t already got one of those, start making one. We’ve heard of people getting onto an MA course with a few 6×4 machine prints in an envelope, but you’d have to be an awfully good talker.
8. If you’ve got a sketchboook, tidy it up and take that too. If you haven’t, it’s definitely about time to start one. These are strange and often rather lovely beasts – more on that in another post.
9. If you are a digital maven make some prints using the best printer you can find, and that’s not usually the one on your desk at home. Use your local pro lab or mail order.
10. Be nervous. It shows you’re keen. And nobody likes a smartypants.
11. If they ask you to go away and do X, go away and do X rather well, then phone them up when you’re ready to show them your magnificent X. It’s a device often used as a filter, to show how committed you are. If they don’t actually like your X, they will still be impressed that you’ve followed their advice, which is a basic requirement anyway.
12. Teaching the same bunch of 19-20 year olds year in, year out can have all kinds of obvious and hidden benefits but after a few years they do all tend to blur into oneness. You, however, are going to stand out whatever you do, so make sure you’re memorable for all the right things and not as a cynical old know-all.
13. Be prepared for a few personal questions about how you are going to pay for the course, because it is expensive. Most photography degree courses require you to have your own equipment, and they sell film and paper and printing but it’s always to make them a bit of profit. If you’re retired and/or on a low income, it’s doable but they will want to know that you can complete. There might be bursaries. Ask about them after you have been offered the place, or ask their student services department.
14. When you get an offer, you don’t have to accept. You will spend 2, 3 or 4 years of your precious mid-life with no spare money, no social life, and you will lose friends and neglect your family. Your photography might improve far more if you spend a year with 52 rolls of HP5 and a Leica M6. If you’ve always wanted to spend a year with a M6, now might be the time to do it.
Whatever you decide, good luck! Let us know how you get on.
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4 Comments
My, it seems a lot to do to apply! Are photography courses getting oversubscribed or something?
If there was anything I’d add it’d be a reminder to applicants that the interview is also a chance to interview the institution, particularly if its open-day left you with questions.
They take as many students as they can cram in, often doubled-up so there are two (or more) courses running at the same time, with the same (few) tutors and in the same space. And they still behave as if they’re paying, rather than the other way around. Quote: “these students expect to get anything they want now they’re paying for everything.” Can leave one speechless, really.
You’re spot on about interviewing the institution. I’d like to see real results. Where are your students a year on, 5 years on. I don’t think they keep any outcome stats.
At Redeye’s National Photography Symposium this summer there was much comment about the huge number of courses (over 300) with the word photography in them in the UK and some comment also about the lack of real opportunities for photography graduates to develop a career in photography. Generally it was agreed (especially by those involved in the teaching) that most photography graduates would not end up ‘doing photography’.
I started my course full of enthusiam and this steadily waned as time went by. Its not photography in itself, for I love photography and during my course my appreciation deepened.
Truthfully I now view the whole photography degree world with some suspicion. On the lecturing side the degree world provides some photographers with a way of earning a living and still be associated ish with photography. Its a world where getting you signed up (to help secure their department’s funding for the next year) takes all precendence over any honest appraisal about the highly limited opportunities and the dire state of the some of the ‘market’.
Its a bit dog eat dog really – or least it probably will be. Deep down most of these lecturers must suspect that its a bubble waiting to burst. Selling unfulfillable expectations to large numbers of (paying) customers is all too New Labour. In fact the only thing that kept the bubble going this far is that it is the student who is paying.
But the thing that angered me above all else as I worked through the course briefs and began to assimulate what was going on around me , was the complete air of resignation among the teaching staff. Wry smiles announcing the demise of editorial, a shrug of the shoulders and open raised palms the death of the photo library. As though none of this was of their doing, as though they stand aloof from the world around them, insulated in their (for the time being) towers from where they observe the collapse of all the old structures. As though they were in every way absolved from any responsibility for their profession or their ‘apprentices’.
And I wonder if this is symptomatic of a wider malaise within the photography community where there seems to be a lack of organisation. I mean, I really enjoyed listening to the debates at The National Photography Symposium, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much of it was gesturing and tokenism. Tick the box been there done that.
What happens next I thought? Does everyone wait until the next one?
I was at that Symposium, and deliberately didn’t go to that workshop. You’ve pretty much described here what I thought it would be like. Photography is the new sociology in utility for employment terms.
It would be altogether less dishonest if the whole process could be split between arts-based degrees and industry-specific vocational courses. In practical terms, the BA/HND or FDa split is supposed to achieve that, but in reality there is very little difference. An additional history or critical analysis module in the BA maybe, but that’s it. And no socio-economic or industry awareness theory, at least not where I was. Unless someone had read a column in the redtop BJP or whatever. Dismal really.
What is worrying is that courses and their resources are micromanaged by technicians who have very little intellectual grasp of conceptual photography or what would make a good editorial or documentary piece, and whose technical skills are limited to an efficacy with whatever version of photoshop they happen to have installed to scrub away the inevitable dust spots integral to digital processing.
I agree, few staff seem to think they have any influence over well, anything except who gets or doesn’t get to hire out their lighting set. “The industry is just like that” was the excuse for rampant upskirt sexism in the studios, and the struggle all the young people were having to get paid placements. Gruesome, really.
There’s another couple of posts in my head around surviving one’s photography degree course which might make more of these issues you raise, and I agree none of it makes very comfortable reading.
And I agree completely about the Redeye Symposium. I also enjoyed it, very much, but came away thinking wtf was that all for. The closing speaker just took the metaphorical biscuit, really. Or the urine, if one wants to get down to it. Having the contacts to ring up the Cube, or Saatchi or whomever, is completely outside the reach of most of the jobbing photographers in the room. Actually, didn’t whoever it was ring her? I don’t think it’s at all inspiring to hear how she stood in a poverty stricken war zone making massive prints for her collectors in the fine art world. Made me feel ashamed.
Yes. What does happen next?
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