Visual Communications at Washington University in St. Louis?

amptron2x
Sun, 11 May 2008 22:32:00 +0000

I spoke to my son about the Wash U VisCom program and asked him whether he knew any one in the program who had transferred in from an art school. He said a friend of his had transferred into the VisCom program from RISD for the same reason that Laura’sDad’s daughter had cited. She said that the level of instruction and training at Wash U was at least as good as that at RISD, and that she liked Wash U better because of the wider range of academic opportunities.

A few words about the VisCom program at Wash U:

As taxguy pointed out, the core or foundation program at Wash U is spread out over two years. However, the kinds of courses and the number of credits (24) in the core program are identical to that of MICA’s foundation program. The same holds true for the art history requirements. The reason the core program is spread out over two years is to allow the students to also take courses that meet the school’s general academic requirements.

Wash U does offer fewer design and Viscom courses, but the lesser number is misleading. Rather than offering a larger number of individual courses that focus on specific topics within Viscom, it offers single, year appropriate courses that focus on a large number of topics in succession. For example, next year my son is taking the first of two Junior level VisCom courses in his Fall semester. It’s an eight credit course that meets three times a week from 9:00 to 4:00 and covers typography, image creation and editing, sequential design, messaging, publication design, basic art direction, motion studies and the major computer applications used in the industry. In his senior year, he’ll take another set of 8 credit courses that focus on his specific Viscom interest, either Advertising Design, Graphic Design, or Illustration. Wash U also offers a substantial number of studio elective courses, and requires BFA students to take 15 hours of studio electives and another 8 hours of art or academic electives.

The bottom line is this: The Wash U BFA art program is not, as far as I can tell, designed to provide only broad based training in the arts with a cursory dip into one specialty or another. It is, instead, high quality, focused and professionally oriented. It requires, at a minimum, 75 hours of studio art credits and 15 hours of art history credits. It also requires an additional 8 hours of art or academic electives. If a student chooses to take those 8 hours in studio art, he or she can graduate with 83 studio art credits (comparable to MICA’s requirement of 84). In short, the Wash U program is for kids whose aim is to become professional artists.

For more detailed info about the VisCom program, here’s a link to the Wash U page that describes the program requirements: http://art.wustl.edu/userfiles/File//BFA%20Degree%20Requirements.pdf

And here’s a link to the page where you can see a list of art courses that Wash U offers: http://courses.wustl.edu/

To use this website:

1. Go to the website.

2. Click Listing on the upper left side.

3. In the screen that appears, select the semester you want.

4. Select Design & Visual Arts – Art under School, and then click Select Semester and School.

5. On the next screen, select either F10 or F20, the levels on the right, and then click Select Departments and Levels.