Need some assistance on schooling for Graphic Design?

Question

I have been home-schooled through American School for the past 4 years, and have just recently graduated in April. After seeing alot of people go off to college, it gave me quite a bit of incentive to get some form of a career path moving along.

So at the current moment I work at Best Buy and they have a tuition assistance program I will be looking into. I have not taken any standardized testing due to the fact I was home-schooled, so I will be taking that somewhere if it is needed. I live about an hour outside of Chicago and was for a time looking at either "The Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago or Schaumburg," or "Westwood College." I recently started looking at "The School at the Art Institute of Chicago." So far after doing a bit of digging around I am leaning towards the latter, I obviously wanna get my money's worth out of it.

I am basically going to ask some really basic questions just so I get an idea from some real people, and not just a web site.

I would like to know and posotive or negatives about any of these schools.?

What the main difference between Visual Communications & Graphic Design is?(Stupid one, I know)

Any good places to start looking for grants?

What the difficulty level is of getting into any of these?

What is the helpfulness of the teachers in these schools?

I am not just some kid fresh out of school that thinks I can design, I have the creative desire, but not the knowledge to create it. I don't have a HUGE amount of work to put together for a portfolio. I have a bunch of forum signatures I have made, some logos, as well as some work I have done for my Dad, as he is a photographer, so I have some high school senior model work, as well as 1 corporate design, that made in into a European DanFoss magazine as a full page print.

I plan on going to the local college and speaking to a counselor, as well as my sister-in-law's brother got a degree in graphic design in Ohio, because he needed a scientific degree to go to law school.

I plan on driving it everyday, so the plan if possible is to go to class Mon-Thurs, 9-5ish. I don't exactly know where I would like to work, a big wish is "The Ant Farm" in L.A. I know the owners son or nephew, so we'll see what happens there. If I need a letter of reference the best place for me to get that would be my tutor probably, so I would like to know if that would be acceptable to the school.

Thanks for all your help!

-Micro

Answer 1

First off, a graphic design degree is usually a bachelor of fine arts, not a bachelor of science.  Schools like Westwood offer programs called graphic design that are really computer design for people who have no real art skills.  Graphic design is a field which has been to some extent mislabeled in recent years, and due to the influx of colleges like Westwood that advertise on TV and make it seem like graphic design is a great and lucrative career, there can be more designers than there are jobs.  It really does depend on what type of design you want to do, but if you don't have an art background at all you can get into school, but won't do as well.

I don't know much about The Ant Farm, but design in general can be pretty competitive, especially in certain venues and locations.  And pretty much any potential employer will be more interested in a portfolio and schooling than a reference letter and who you may know.  Also, if you plan to go to downtown Chicago from suburbia, give serious consideration to the Metra train to get there and back.  It is way faster and cheaper, and if you've ever had to park downtown you know what I mean.