Is University the best place to learn Web Design?
After a browse of my RSS reader this afternoon, I came across this post from net tuts+ and as someone who has recently completed year one of university it was an interesting read. The article discusses the benefits and drawbacks of attending university to learn web development and includes real-life experiences of people who went to university to study computing.
Overall the article is positive about university attendance although not just from the perspective of learning the techniques to become a web designer or developer, but also from other aspects such as the social side and the broadening of horizons that university can bring.
The reasons that I decided to attend university were that at the time it came to apply I felt that I wasn’t ready to enter the workforce straight away and felt that a university setting would be more beneficial in the long term. As the article touches on though, universities struggle to keep up with the latest technologies and in the web industry the pace of change is faster than most other industries. This is true of my university in that some of the techniques are a bit out-dated but by doing additional reading of blogs and article sites to keep up to date with the latest changes in technique and technology. Another aspect that benefitted me personally was the fact that I had some experience before and during my time at university which gives me real-life examples and experience to compliment my teaching at university, which I would recommend to anyone as it has certainly benefitted me.
The other option instead of attending university would be to go into employment and build up a portfolio of work to show potential employers the abilities that someone possesses and this can be a very beneficial way of going about it but at the end of the day I think it should come down to the individual and the choice that they decide to make. Although I will say that if you decide to attend university then don’t just blindly follow the lecturers and what theey tell you, it’s important to do some activity on your own such as blog reading and listening to podcasts in order to broaden your knowledge will go along way. Get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to as many web design/development related blogs and sites to supplement the knowledge gained in class.
Photo: Used under Creative Commons from Flickr, original here
