Doodling on the edge of this page as you are reading? If you are, or even if you've just remembered that you must put a portfolio together and apply to the National College of Art and Design, now is the time to do it - the deadline is only weeks away.
Application forms and portfolios for entry to the first-year core studies course - the common first year of the four-year degree courses in craft design, fashion design, textile design, visual communication, and fine art, and their joint options - are due on Friday, January 25th, 2002. Application is directly to NCAD.
Frank Bissette, head of first-year core studies, describes the first-year course as a broad visual education: photography, drawing, painting, computers, visual studies in three dimension through to dimensional design are all studied.
"During the course of the year they have an opportunity to specialise within the areas they feel their skills may be best suited to," he says. There is a first and a second choice in those areas. "After that the course moves slightly more focused towards the area they might have an interest in. By the end of the year they make application to the department they think their strength is in." At the end of the year and in the final three years of the degree, students will be in a specialised area such as ceramics, glass, metals; fashion; printed textiles, embroidered textiles, woven textiles; visual communication; printing; sculpture; or media studies.
Just under 150 students were taken on in 2001, but this would be the maximum, says Bissette, though they try to build the numbers up each year because of the quality of the applicants - they don't want the talent going to other colleges.
Because NCAD is part of the National University of Ireland, applicants face the academic hurdle of needing two honours and four passes, of which three subjects must be languages - English, Irish and a third. Art, however, is counted as a language. "It is a visual language," says Bissette. Selection is thereafter based on quality of portfolio.
Entry is by no means confined to those who have done art at school. "Some students wouldn't do art in the Leaving and would still get into the course." Some, Bisette says, may have decided to concentrate on other subjects for their Leaving Cert and may have done a portfolio preparation course. Other students who have primary or master's degrees in other areas, but have always had an interest in the visual arts, would put together a portfolio in their own time. Some 60 per cent tend to come straight from school, 30 per cent come from portfolio preparation courses and the rest are mature or overseas candidates. The male to female ratio mirrors that of art at second level - one-third male, two-thirds female.
First-year core studies students attend college five days a week.
The majority of the week is devoted to project-based work and one day a week is devoted to the history of art and design and in complementary studies such as aesthetics, media studies, sociology and film studies.
Graphics and painting in the fine arts are two of the prime areas that students are very interested in. There are excellent career options in graphic arts and more jobs than graduates in textiles and fashions, says Bissette. There are also prospects in the fine arts now, he says, "with the new media sections and the rise of visual literacy in terms of music in many ways, like MTV. The rise of the visuals needed for bands to accentuate their music [means] a lot of fine artists are involved in putting together more avant garde type of videos for band, so the job prospects are vast." As we are becoming more visually literate there is a call for more innovative individuals to take up a career in the new arts.
Those unsure of how to compile a portfolio can have a look at a leaflet from the college on how the portfolios are assessed. This has been made available under the Freedom of Information Act and gives applicants a guide to assembling a portfolio.
