I am thinking about looking deeper into Full Sail because the program looks good and its in my favorite state (Florida). But then again there is digipen which is in Washington (currently living in Alaska). I am looking into both of them and I am sort of leaning to Full Sail. Anyone disagree? Anyone attending one of these schools? Comments?

digipen

Hey guys I like the input but mind explaining why? Otherwise I don't learn anything O.o

I'm currently in my second year at DigiPen. I, like you, also considered Full Sail as a potential school to attend, but when I got accepted at DP I decided to come here, and I'm quite happy with my decision. DigiPen has some problems (a few lousy teachers, a fair amount of disorganization), but in my (somewhat biased) opinion, if you're willing to work for it you'll get a much better education here than at Full Sail or any other "game school". I don't have any first hand experience with the Full Sail curriculum, but looking through the course catalog and comparing it to the sequence of courses we take here at DigiPen, Full Sail simply seems to be a much less rigorous program. For example, Full Sail appears to offer only one course in Physics. DigiPen offers five undergraduate courses (only two of which are strictly required for graduation). Full Sail teaches Calculus, Trigonometry, and basic Linear Algebra, while DigiPen offers numerous higher-level mathematics courses such as Graph Theory, Abstract Algebra, and Curves & Surfaces. Full Sail will teach you specific APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL, while DigiPen will teach you the underlying concepts involved, such as how to implement the 3D graphics pipeline in software. Basically, Full Sail will equip you with the tools you need while DigiPen will equip you with a deeper understanding of those tools and the ability to build them yourself if necessary.

As I see it, the major advantage to Full Sail is the amazingly short time in which you can earn your degree. I believe the Bachelor's program (assuming you fail no courses) takes about a year and a half to complete, which means that you can take those extra 2.5 years and put them towards learning on the job (not to mention earning real money while the rest of us are piling up student loans to pay rent). I think the decision basically comes down to the importance you place on getting into the industry as soon as possible ass opposed to getting the best game development education you can. If you want the latter, I would definitely go with DP.

Ok leaning toward DP now. Because I don't want to go to school to go to a school that dosen't offer much of a chalange. I would like to ask what kind of perequisites (classes in High School) I should have. Also maybe the grades i should be getting too. I already get decient grades( A's and B's). I am currently a Junior in High School and I only need 2.5 credits next year because I worked for extra high school credits in 8th grade. So I can take just about any class I want. I even have the option of taking a computer science class at a tech center for the first 3 periods of my day instead of other classes in school. Should I take that??

Thats good to know because like I said I am ahead comparied to most. I am taking pre-cal this year and next year I am taking cal. All in high school. :)

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Additionaly DigiPen is a fully accredited institution where as full sail is not. What I meen by this is you could transfer DP credits to a 'standard' university

DigiPen is accredited. However, it is worth noting that the accreditation they have is federal and not regional. The latter is the kind of accreditation that most colleges and universities (Brown, NYU, CMU, Drexel, Stanford, et cetera, et cetera) have. The former is the same kind of accreditation that technical trade schools and beauty schools have.

Furthermore, accreditation (or lack thereof) does not guarantee transferability of credits -- that is a matter that the school you would be trying to transfer to them to has to decide.

To the OP: I would encourage you to examine other, so-called "regular" schools for computer science or software engineering degrees. There is no advantage to going to a school like DigiPen or Full Sail over any other school in terms of getting in to the game development industry; there's no reason to limit your options. DigiPen offers you some interesting educational opportunities (in particular, their graphics curriculum is equivalent to most graduate-level graphics programs in other schools), but in return you also lose of lot of traditional computer science theory, which may hurt you in the long run or require you to learn it on your own -- I've found that generally, when faced with the task of learning either the "game related" material or the "traditional material" on their own, students will prefer -- and do better with -- the "game related" material since it's obviously more interesting to them. The "traditional" material is often viewed as boring and unneccessary, which is of course not true.

It is thus that, despite having completed my undergraduate degree at DigiPen, I tend not to recommend it as strongly as one would expect. I would expect I could make the same assertion about Full Sail, but I've never attended so I can't say for sure. Don't limit your options.