Emily Carr University of Art + Design

My experience with Emily Carr has been so disappointing, I started my studies last year at ECU. From day 1 when I decided to study here, I had so many doubts so I tried calling to talk to someone and I had no luck, 7 days calling and no one pick a phone. So I end up going all the way to the campus just to find out they will make me use a computer in campus to go online and make an appointment to talk to someone. I had to wait a month for this appointment, most of my questions were not responded. Even thought this happened, I decided to give another chance to ECU and sign innnI applied for a grant for one of my courses and honestly if I knew the waiting times for a response would be so long, I would have prefer to pay in full just for a piece of mind and avoid unnecessary stress. I applied and waited around 3 weeks not knowing if I my application was in, in review, if I had a spot saved in the class or else. Compared to other course I end up paying in full which of course, THEIR PAYMENT SYSTEM ON THEIR WEBSITE IS THE MOST EFFICIENT THING EMILY CARR HAS.nnTo continue with my experience, one of my classes was really amazing in campus vs the online experience where in one of my courses my teacher was not Vancouver based and every class we had he tried to wrap up classes earlier, because he was tired, it was late where he was. At some point he decided to not give us breaks so he could finish the class early every week. My next semester one of my classes was fine, but the second class again was really sad, the teacher had really bad English pronunciation which made it really hard for everyone to understand the topic HTML/CSS.nnToday I am seriously considering quitting my studies and career dreams because the experience with the expensive classes I have paid for vs what I'm actually learning. The campus is beautiful and they have really good marketing skills and a few good teacher but to be honest after 6 months spending hard money here I would say, I don't think it's worth it. Try other schools which I know for fact their staff are way more involved in actually making your learning experience a good one and they care about their students more than only the payments.nnIt seems to me like the only time when someone in campus will talk to you is if you have a credit card to make a payment. I decided to post this because I already mention this in my surveys after each class and no one has even care to ask more about this issues.nnGood luck if you decide to study here

This school was my dream school, but the administration and advising office made it the worst, most miserable, experience of my life. I ended up dropping all my classes out of frustration dealing with the office staff. I won’t get in to detail about it.nnI see either two situations here:n1 The office staff are incompetent and have no clue how to do their jobs. Every time I talked to someone they omitted certain information that would have helped me make better decisions. Every person I talked to always had no information and always said different things from another person.nn2 There must be pressure from upper management coming down on everyone working at this school. These are the vibes that I got at this school. For example we were constantly told we had to use sign in sheets for the main reason that upper management wouldn’t steal the space from the program. I feel this is the same with the employees and their hands were tied fearing for their jobs to give me the information I needed.nnI see it as #2 in my case because I don’t believe so many people to be incompetent. I feel bad for the employees working in such a toxic work environment and I hope my review doesn’t rustle many feathers.nnI will say, it took months for people to try to help me. But as soon as I signed the form to drop out, they had it done in a day. Felt like a criminal with how that whole situation was dealt with.nnAs someone who paid a hefty price, monetary and mentally, to go there, I feel like I have an obligation to tell people to run away as fast as they can if they’re considering this school.nnIf you do decide to go to this school, I hope you never have any issues that you need to talk to anyone in the office.nnIt’s given me the confidence to know I can compete with other artists to even get accepted in to a school like this.nnI know they won’t be getting another cent from me.

Emily Carr is a gorgeous school with engaging faculty. My issues lie with administration and advising services which single handedly tainted my entire experience. They gave me the run around on several occasions, costing me months of precious time and thousands extra in classes due to unclear communications. In 4th year, I still heard stories regularly from younger students experiencing the same struggles. I don’t want to lay the blame on advising entirely because although they could have used more training, this really is an administrative issue and a lack of care and funding from their superiors. I doubt anything will ever change on this front. I sent several communications to the dean and deans assistant which were all met by radio silence. Not to mention, the student advocate role which I was informed was in place to help escalate and dispute administrative decisions remained vacant for the entire time I attended the school 2022-24, so there was never a point of contact for escalation, which seems very shady

The 2024 masters thesis exhibition and the capture photography show were both so breathtaking!! The campus is also just really nice in general.

The school is beautiful, the inside is beautiful, the teachers are great but the food is a bit pricey