COLLEGE AND CLASSES IN NYC

Hey, so I'm officially back home in Finland for Christmas, but that doesn't mean I'm done posting about my trip, since there's a lot to cover! So, this time I actually wanted to tell you about the college life in New York, how is it different from Scotland (where I study) and so on, so let's begin.

My major back in Scotland is Fashion Communication, which is very much like the Fashion Media major at LIM in New York. But, instead of being under a course major, us exchange students actually  got to pick courses we wanted to take at LIM. In Scotland, everyone under the same major take the same courses, but at LIM, even though for their students there's some mandatory courses they need to take, they can also choose a lot of the courses themselves, and even minor on a different subject to their major. But, like I said, we actually got to choose the courses ourselves, we just had a certain amount of credits we had to take (12), for it to make up one semester at our home university. The courses I ended up getting (you have to have a few options for these, since you won't necessarily get into the courses you want to the most) were Fashion Forecasting, Styling Essentials, Creative Direction and Styling and Display Graphics.




Fashion Forecasting was probably my favourite course. Our teacher was amazing, the course topics were interesting, and I actually learned a lot about a subject I never really knew much about: how to forecast trends. We had quite a lot of work for this course too, and well, we actually had quite a lot of work for each course I was taking, since I'm used to just working on a big project towards the end of the semester, rather than having assignments pretty much weekly as well as midterms. This kept me motivated to actually study a lot though and not forget about college work in my free time either. For example, in fashion forecasting we had to do a blog post every week about an upcoming trend we were intrigued about or that we liked, which was really fun, although it got harder and harder towards the end when you started to run out of ideas. We also had three presentations to do, which again were pretty fun, yet challenging.

Styling Essentials and Creative Direction and Fashion Styling were both styling courses, yet quite different from each other. Styling Essentials was the only course I actually had to purchase a book for, and we used it for most of the content in our classes; went through the chapters one by one and had a few quizzes on them, which I really wasn't expecting from a styling course. We also had field trips to all the big luxury fashion department stores, and finished the course with a photoshoot, which to be honest I though we'd have more in the course. In Creative Direction and Styling, we had more of photoshoots, but they were group photoshoots, which meant you had to work well within one. The photoshoots themselves weren't as creative as I would've liked, and the actual "Creative Direction" part of the course was pretty much non-existent, but I mean you can't like every course you take. Maybe it was because I was working with a stylist myself and knew what the job actually was like, which is why I wanted more from the course itself, but I'm sure for someone who isn't working with a stylist the course could teach a lot.



And last but not least, probably the course I struggled with the most, but also probably which taught me the most, was Display Graphics. First of all, I've previously struggled a bit with Illustrator and InDesign, because to me Photoshop is so much easier to use, so it was challenging to be forced to mostly just use these two applications and actually create something that looked pretty decent with them. But even though I struggled throughout the course a lot, and had moments when I felt like everyone else was better than me, I did learn a lot of skills that will definitely be useful in the future. I already have A/A- 's from all of my other courses, so just waiting on what grade I will get from this one... (UPDATE : Got a B+, guess I didn't suck as much as I thought I did!)

Anyway, in conclusion, the work load is definitely distributed differently in the US than in Scotland, which was a nice change, although with my internship and college I felt like I barely had any free time in some weeks. Also, it was quite nice to choose your own courses, but it's always a hit or miss when you do so, and some courses you'll obviously like more than the others. When you do choose your courses though, you can have huge gaps in between some classes and some really long days, because you're pretty much creating your own timetable from the courses available.



That's it for now, feel free to ask any questions!

-Linda