2 reviews for Gateshead College

Firstly no information is passed around college and the rarity of information we get regarding our apprenticeships is usually wrong, or incomplete. The staff constantly complain about each other and there has been no checking in on us over lockdown, my emails have been unanswered for weeks and I feel that the college has been a let down when it comes to mental health. They have a crisis waiting to happen. They are short staffed for the amount of students resulting on big periods with no formal education when the only tutor went on the sick. Overall a very poor college and I would highly recommend looking towards Newcastle college where I certainly felt we were looked after and wanted rather than cash cows. I'm very happy that my company is moving the next generation of apprentices to a college down south its just a pity we have had to endure such bad practice.

A Micky Mouse course. Overall experience has been pretty negative unfortunately. The course itself really isn't put together very well and an overwhelming amount of the content within the course teaches information which is essentially useless in the grand scheme of things. There is so much content which is "games related" but in reality teaches you very very little of use that you can take forward to either building skills or to a role in the industry. This course is promoted as a "games course" which will teach you various practical skills used in the games industry, however I want anyone reading to know very clearly that this is NOT the case. This is close enough to being a "games theory" course. You learn a lot about ideas within the games industry and content that is games related but you will learn very very little essential skills within your time on the course. If you're learning to become a 3D Artist, animator, level designer etc, this course wont teach you any of these essential skills to even be considered at a decent level. When I say "games related" content, an example of things like this can be when we spent what felt like weeks researching into "game platforms". This meant things like learning about CD ROMs, floppy disks, cartridges, streaming games etc. There is so much useless content like this where the topics like "game platforms" make you research ultra specific questions about things that in reality you can learn with a quick google search, however the way the units are made make these general knowledge questions take quite a while to answer. E.g we were once asked to create an entire timeline of all game platforms ever created - again, games related but this content in reality is no use for our future and isn't building any skills that are necessary to go further in the industry. I would be fine if this was just one part of one unit within the course, however every unit was filled to the brim with content of a similar vain. To summarise. Please STAY AWAY from this course. It is not well put together at all and is not in the interest of learning essential knowledge that you will need. If you are genuinely interested in learning skills that are used in the games industry like 3D modelling, animation, games engines etc, this course is not for you and wont teach you these to a level that you would probably expect, or even at all. The main problem myself and countless others have had on the course is that the content itself is generally useless and you can't take much of it further in the future to be used, it is mostly to simply fill out work within the units within the course. We even had one of the tutors admit that the work was a load of BS, but explained that unfortunately this is part of what the exam board requires. It was genuinely depressing knowing that you've dedicated yourself to starting a course to then find out that the course is of a very poor quality and at this point of realisation, it was too late to try find another course or switch to something else. And to top it all off, you find out that in reality a games HNC course isn't worth anything. If you know what the term "Micky Mouse course/Micky Mouse degree" means, this is the perfect example.