Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), a Qatar Foundation (QF) partner university, will offer portfolio development classes for high school students during the first semester of the academic year 2024.
Organised by the university’s Community and Continuing Education (CCE) wing, the classes are a series of in-depth, non-credit sessions for students who would like to gain the skills necessary to develop a competitive portfolio of their art and design work tailored to university requirements.
The programme is offered across four different time schedules, allowing students to choose a timetable that best suits their individual needs and day-to-day routines.
For the year 2024, applicants can choose from classes that run as follows: September 1-October 20, September 16-November 4, October 1-November 19, and October 23-December 11.
The programme focuses on a key factor that art, design and architecture universities look for in addition to technical skills when selecting suitable applicants for their programmes – originality in thinking and development.
Hence, the programme is designed to encourage participants to develop portfolios that reflect their unique interpretations of a theme or topic.
The classes will be taught by VCUarts Qatar alumni who will provide personalised feedback during the learning process.
Participants will receive a certificate of completion upon meeting all the course requirements including attending the required sessions.
Participants will be exposed to a series of sessions that will teach them the nuances of basic, advanced and observational drawing, the process and application of creative thinking, methods to effectively communicate ideas to an audience, and how to use a camera to document progressive stages of their work.
Rasha Alkasab, VCUarts Qatar’s Community and Continuing Education programme manager, noted that the relevance of the programme lies in the fact that an art or design portfolio is considered to be a prerequisite not just for admission into a university, but also for job prospects across fields as varied as art, design, architecture, product design, technology, and innovation.
A still from a previous workshop.
