Do we all need to have a spend years study and thousands of pounds of debt to get anywhere in this industury?

->certainly not. "anywhere" in this industry -fits it very well. ;) i think it's more an individual pattern of toughts than a professional postulate.

Shouldnt it be all about the work not about a bit of paper?
->it is just about work!
i have that stupid degree, but still no career ;)

greets from belgrade

I degree

isnt the degree all about connections.

the student designers i know, went on to work as full time assistants with the fashion designers they worked for on work experience via the degree course.

Paulus, I am bursting out of my skin to disagree with you.

It really depends what you want out of your life. If all you want is success and power (in any field) then by all means, treat your time at college as one big networking excercise, learn as little as you need to get on and count your days until you are in the workplace, clambering up whoever's back is in your way to the top. Good luck to you.

The top of what, exactly, is the question. The above depresses the life out of me, personally. There is plenty time to learn the horrible truth about institutional politics and how devoid of any intellectual stimulation work can be if you've got no knowledge or genuinely creative aspiration to base it on. I realise that tertiary education is increasingly a luxury (and in that respect I was spoilt) but you will never, ever regret learning as much as you possibly can at university (if you get the chance) and to be crass, combined with hard work, pays dividends later. Especially when you back yourself into a creative corner, which is so common in such a fast-paced and potentially soul-sucking industry as this.

There are so many people in fashion just chasing the campaigns, approaching it as CAREER over any genuine aesthetic ambition. Ask yourself who are the Judy Blames, Simon Foxtons, Ray Petris, Melanie Wards-people who were interested in creating something you'd never seen before more than their day rates- of the Thatcherite (my/our) generation? They are extremely few and the already turgid magazine magazine market is set to suffer from further creative impoverishment as a result.

So my (probably very unpopular) advice to anyone would be: be totally non-strategic in choosing your subject. Forget career-targeted courses and return to the Humanities (the history of IDEAS for God's sake), which offer life-long knowledge, not just empty methodology. You've got forty-five years of five-year-plans ahead of you. Don't let yourself be turned into quasi-YTS fodder for global fashion just yet! Save something for yourself.

my point was not that the degree /course is about connections, of corse it is to do your own thing.

but the students i know had work experience with very well know designers via the course and these relationships allowed them to carry on working with them after the course.

once with them they gained more contacts and experience at the top level.the fashion designers were approached by the university and the students would not have got the work experience otherwise

same goes with photography.if you assist the best/most well known(not always the same)photographers, you gain the contacts and experience you would never get on a degree course.

my point was that a degree is for your use to explore, but you can also use it via the connections available.

i doubt if there are any people out there who do not think connections are important, or are not aware of what is going on in the industry.And connections are not always about just improving your career.they can also be for personal projects.

there is a balance that has to be made on degrees to both explore and to realise that after the degree you want to get a job in the industry.many people are not as talented as the people you mentioned and if they do not realise this they wont get a job .

i know many people with photographic degrees, and they used those years to explore photography.

they all now work at jessops....

I appreciate what you are saying, but you are misunderstanding what I am saying if you think I mean that studentship should ultimately be for 'doing your own thing'. I think learning by far outweighs the value of self-expression whilst studying. After all, authorship could just as well be advanced at home.

As for sapping up contacts to get on, I can see it has commercial benefit, but if you're not actually prepared for some sort of mutual exchange with these people, what's the point? It just seems a bit dirty if it's seen as an end in itself.

As for assisting, I would say it is good for some and definitely not for others. Some people are better taking their own pictures from the start if they have some burning issue they are desperate to envision. Assisting can teach technique and how to get a whole project together, but I'm sceptical whether it helps individuals to develop a personal practice and it certainly won't teach them how have ideas of your own. It's interesting to watch how some people can't seem to shake off 'his master's vision' as it were and that can be detrimental.

If I was a photographer that wanted a commerical career -which I'm not- I would probably do it, yes. But I would hope someone would advise me that unless I had a clear idea of the pictures I wanted to take before I went into assisting, then I wouldn't magically graduate from the tenure as a fully-fledged photographer.

ok but i never said anything about sapping up contacts to get on...but rather meeting people you would otherwise not meet.

work experience and assisting, means you meet people on jobs, some you can work with on future projects, some you cant, some can even give you future work, work that might be personal and creative as well as just standard jobs.

I mean contact to refer to this, not a manipulative networking kind of thing.

i guess the other thing about a degree , is having access to equipment you would otherwise not have.

I'm a photographic assistant, and have assisted a well known fashion photographer for the past 18 months. 6 months Prior to becoming an assistant I graduated with a degree in photography. I personally found my degree to be reasonably benifical, but I found that the things I learnt whist studying, were mainly limited to technical photographic skills.

I would totally agree that assisting is a good way to build contacts. Not as a way of climbing to the top - or whatever. But I have met a large number of fashion assistants through work, who I have then gone on to do model testing, or editiorial shoots with. Through assisting I have met and built relationships with so many stylists, makeup artists and hair stylists who I have worked with and hope to work with in the future.

The one thing I really miss about university, is have access to an amazing library. I have just moved to London and I'm desperate to find a good library that I can access as a non student. Can anyone suggest one with a large art, photography, fashion section?