University of Ulster: My Own Personal Experience as a Graphic Designer
My Experience at the University of Ulster, Belfast, as a Graphic Designer of the BA Hons in Visual Communications at York Street. Shame to see Job Cuts!
The Belfast College of Art is a school in the Ulster University Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and is formerly the Belfast Government School of Art. By the looks of it, the course has been broken into separate courses, including Graphic Design BDes (Hons), Photography with Video BA (Hons), and possibly an illustration course. From 1995 to about 1998, so quite a while ago. While here, there were subjects like illustration, graphic design and video. There was absolutely no learning, education or help with how to use the Apple Mac computers other than reading the large, thick instruction books for the software like Macromedia Freehand (later bought over by Adobe), Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXpress. Pagemaker was another DTP layout application which was discontinued and replaced with InDesign. Freehand was a very good 2D vector graphics application that most students used. This was discontinued and merged with Illustrator. The HND was not at the university but at local colleges of further and higher education.
In hindsight, this was a bad choice for me to apply to and go to the University of Ulster Belfast campus. I’m not sure if another university would have been better or not. The first year was not too bad, and I quite liked it, but after the first year, it unravelled for me as a student, and I lost interest completely because of the awful teaching and lecturing. The dilemma was whether to leave or stay. I chose to stay, but in hindsight. I also applied to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, but I had even less of an interest in going there and was not even sure if I would have received a grant and as it was outside the UK, not too sure if the course would have been paid for by the education board.
While I was at the art college, the local education authority paid for the course, and I received a grant. Unfortunately, you would have large fees today. If I took on a student job for the summer, I believe I was not taxed on this. Goodness, how things have changed. For the worse, though, you're going to come out with massive debts that will rise over time. Is it worth it?
My own thoughts as a Past Student
Unfortunately, the course was nowhere near adequate or very good at equipping a professional graphic designer for the real world, thanks to Belfast Ulster Campus! I’ve said this before in a previous blog about the BTEC National Diploma, but you don’t start learning until you actually start working, I’m afraid, as you’ll learn more in two months of work than in two years of education! I can’t see how a job placement would help. I did a job placement a few years earlier in the National Diploma in Lurgan and stayed about three days instead of two weeks, as it was dreadful. If the university asks a student, they'll just tell you what you want to hear. Ask them in a few years to get the true answer! You're just going to be working on things that mean nothing. A business simply doesn’t have the time to train or teach you.
Shame to see so many Job Cuts
I see there are quite a few jobs at risk, in fact, over 450, in both Belfast and Magee, Londonderry campuses, due to a financial deficit of around £25m as of April 2026. Not too sure if this is staff and lecturers or just staff. Want to reach out to me? Comment below.
