IED Barcelona
speciality: Art & Design

Courses and teachers are amazing, as well as opportunities. First semester is a general approach to all design fields at the end of which you can change your major if you decide you want to persue another degree than what you’ve enrolled for, then in second semester you start slowly approaching your specialty. For my field, you can choose in second semester of second year if you want to persue Motion Graphics, Graphic Design or Advertising. Your courses become very focused on what you’ve chosen, for example you do branding, typography (where you learn how to create a font), infographics and other visual communication related subjects. Classes are made up of max 17 students. In 3rd year second semester or 4th year first semester you have to do an internship, and the university helps you find a good one. Once a year, for a week, we have Workshop Week which is a week where professionals collaborate with us to build projects in a very tight deadline. During the years we’ve also had one month workshops for different things such as storytelling, branding or art direction. You can even sign up for free accommodation during Milano Design Week. All of our teachers are professionals who teach on the side of their job. Now, what needs to be improved/ what I personally found to be a minus: You will find it very hard to get a job during uni because the schedule usually consists of 2 classes a day, with each one taking 3 hours. The uni also needs a lot of improvement when it comes to administrative tasks and communication, they don’t handle unforeseen situations very well. You have 80% mandatory attendance for all courses, and if you miss more than that you go straight to retakes (from what I understand this is a government regulation). They have a student services department and discounts for different stuff which helped me a lot in first year.