Sorry to burst your bubble folks, but UTS design qualifications are not really a great value proposition.
Now it seems this forum is pretty much a sycophantic echo chamber for people who love DAB or dream about going there - so of course I'll probably seem like some embittered hater (?). That's cool, this is just the experience of myself and many of my classmates. If you're about to buy a great looking car, you should probably look around and see what else is available for the same money. Well your degree is going to cost as much as a really decent car, and have some serious affect on your career too.
Anyhow - yeah, I attended, and graduated from DAB, Industrial Design School, with honors. And - er, yeah, it's the best Design School in Australia - I see that a lot on this forum too. That is totally meaningless marketing fluff. Working as a designer in Australia alone is not going to be a very fruitful career, there just isn't enough (interesting) work, you will have to travel - and don't think the DAB tag will get you a lot of attention overseas. Marc Newson went there, right? Wrong, he went to Sydney College of the Arts (class of 84), before it was absorbed by UTS (88) - ever wondered why all that old gear in the basement has / had SCA written on it? But even if you believe that Business week article - DAB isn't even in the top 30, it's SECOND LAST on the - uh, "best and fairest" list. Also remember that the programs on that list are almost entirely combined MBA / Design / Postgraduate degrees. DABs program is listed as "TBA". That certainly sounds enticing.
Other DAB Myths / Nasties:
1) It's a great university, many co curricular activities
That part is actually true. Too bad you're unlikely to have any spare time to enjoy them yourself. Continuous, project based assessment means you're likely to be working all night once a week. Fail one project and you're going to wait another year before graduating.
Because of the way the course is structured (a couple of huge multi disciplinary "subjects") , all you need to do is fail ONE critical sub component of ONE subject and you're going to flunk the entire year. That's another year's tuition onto your... whatever debt bondage scam the government is running now.
2) Expensive course materials
The Business and Physics students may not have the nicest looking faculty, but at least the can get most of their course materials from the library / internet and possibly sell on their texts at the end of the year. Design school requires expensive computers, digital cameras, rendering markers, expensive drawing materials, expensive model making materials, not to mention the tools you'll need for interior design / fashion subjects if you're doing them. You'll need to work one day a week just to pay for incidentals. Unless mummy and daddy are loaded and generous, of course.
3) Everybody gets a job / Great Connections to industry
This is usually the company they did industry placement with at the end of 3rd year, and it's a great deal for most of those companies, cheap fresh faced youngsters who'll work themselves to death for less money than they'd earn working at Mcdonalds. If you think it'll improve after paying your dues, well, it will, marginally. But you're not going to clear 60,000AUD for a loooong time.
4) Talented people do well, you didn't make it as a designer (actually I did), so it's not DABs fault. You're just not talented.
Perhaps, but you won't hear that line at the info day. The majority of DAB students are likely just there to make up the numbers and keep the faculty running (it's an expensive proposition, after all). Some of you have already noticed that the 1st year intake is very big. Have a little check of how many are in 2nd year... so... all those people who left just sucked huh?
5) You can transfer from one design major after 1st year
So... you didn't do so well in your last year at high school. Now you're going to top your class in a major you don't want to be in so you can transfer? There's an interview and portfolio assessment too - so you'll need to be kicking ass with your own indy work *while* excelling in the crappy major you don't want to do, and getting killed with uni bills. Best of luck with that.
OK, so that was quite a lot of negativity. Do I just hate design? No, I worked as a designer for 10 years and most of the time I loved it, and most of my clients loved my work too. But you fight through 5 hellish years of uni, then another 5 years of long hours, clients ripping you off, redundancies, lousy / trashed projects, and what do you have to show for it? A below average salary, massive HECS / FEE HELP / whatever debt, paltry savings, starvation, poverty. Chuckle away kids, odds are this is your future too. I figured I could eat shit "designing" kitchens (or whatever) 15 hours a day for 50,000 a year or get paid triple that for half the hours in a different industry, I could do my own design projects in my own time and still come out ahead.
But I leanered all those skills from DAB right? Well, yes and no. Actual contact hours meant a 4 year course was in reality about 1 years' real "tuition". Think you're going to get a lot of in depth instruction in 1st year with 300 other students? Heh, "Self Directed Learning", so what the hell was I actually paying for?
The money you'll end up owing for a Bachelors at DAB will pay a significant fraction of the costs incurred studying undergraduate design at one of those top flight universities that IS in the top 30 (well, not RCA, but KAIST and Shih Chien, Hong-Ik, SNU ). Also remember that on Australian design salaries your debt will take around 20 YEARS to repay, unless you can add your own repayments later on (with all that money you'll be making huh?) Degrees from those other universities may be more widely regarded, and the Northern hemisphere schools will have links to industry that are an order of magnitude more fruitful than anything DAB comes up with.
Lastly - just as a comparison. The UTS medal winner for Law got a scholarship to Oxford, worked at a top fight law firm, travelled, great career. UTS medal winner for Industrial Design - designing kitchens at a mid tier firm. So I hope you really want it guys.
Best of luck, and caveat emptor.
-NN.
