The truth about going to fancy UX Design school
As someone from a different professional background (Journalism), I decided that going to a fancy school would be better for my CV and my portfolio.
I thought that paying a little extra would be worth it for the excellent school name and maybe a better education.
Spoiler alert, I was wrong.
In summer 2020, I enrolled in a certificate program at Parsons School of Design and took three long and expensive courses there. I’m going to talk more about each, but to sum it up: they got me more confused rather than educated.
The first course was Intro to UX design. I paid about a thousand bucks, and it lasted nine weeks. The syllabus was all over the place. The video classes were edited so that sometimes it was hard to understand the context of anything our young teacher was saying.
To do my homework, I had to use a lot of Google and YouTube resources. And after submission, I’d never get any feedback. I tried to contact the teacher, asking what he thought about my work. He said, “ Everything is good” and disappeared for good.
The second course was the Fundamentals of Interaction Design. This one (another 1k) was the most informative. Our new teacher was giving us ample resources and in-depth feedback about our work. During those nine weeks, I learned all the essential UX skills and filled the gaps for everything I had missed in the intro.
The third and the worst one was Usability Testing.
It was torture for six weeks that felt like forever.
I had been waiting for this specific course for a long time because it was supposed to provide a first case study for my portfolio.
In reality, the lessons were unedited, long, and low-quality voice-overs that most of the students did not understand. The research paper we were filling weekly all of a sudden changed into a different product.
Long story short, most of the students were frustrated, so I contacted the school administration and the teacher himself. After three days of intense email wars, our teacher accepted our offer to change the syllabus so our research paper would only concentrate on one product. It was a mess.
We had finally come to understand that even though we were paying the top price for the education, the courses were poorly managed, horribly coordinated, and overall super vague.
My friend got in touch with students who were ahead of us, taking the How to create the portfolio course. They told us that it was even worse than the previous one. We decided to do more research and find a school where we wouldn’t spend extra hours googling things to understand the poorly-made video classes.
After a few days, my friend found the Interaction Design Foundation (not sponsored or related), where I paid $199 for the one-year membership and unlimited courses. The overall quality of education is much higher here and for a fraction of the price of Parsons. I still can’t believe how much money, time, and emotional resources I wasted for more than a half year when I could have just studied here.
I learned my lesson! Expensive doesn’t always mean better. If you’re thinking of becoming a designer and looking for a school, please, don’t fall for the reputation, do your research and find a good deal. After all, in the tech world, no one gives a damn about institutions.
