I’m studying interior architecture at what is considered a 'prestigious' design school in my country and I am 31 years old, so a bit older than my cohort. Throughout my whole course I’ve maintained a distinction average, except for this one particular class where my lecturer only just passed me for every single submission. For this whole semester, I’ve shown up to every class, put in more than 9 hours of study outside class per week and I feel I really engaged in the content by listening, actively participating in discussions and doing the weekly readings. In all honestry it's not the high grade I'm chasing, I just want to feel like I'm making progress in the course, and obviously if I have grades that indicate that I am lacking certain skills, I want to correct this as I'm sacrificing a lot as an older student pursuing this career.

I’ll admit that the lecturer’s subject was super pretentious and the assignment briefs were always very vague. However, I spent a lot of time clarifying key points with him. I do have an equitable learning plan for my adhd which allows for me to gain further assistance when requested from lecturers, but this didn’t stop me from feeling stupid and annoying. I made time to get feedback from him after each assessment and he always seemed pretty irritable and it was hard to get anything very specific from him other than him saying he would have liked my designs to be “more immersive”. I know if I follow up with him again to gain feedback he will give me a pretty cold and impersonal response reluctantly agreeing to meet up and when we do he will stare at me condescendingly while remaining tight lipped on what I need to do to improve further.

I also have another lecturer for my studio and she is actually super nice. I sent through all my completed studio work over to her a whole week in advance for feedback and she told me it looks good and gave me a very brief list of areas she thinks I should improve. I had a lot of freedom with my design and she encouraged me to make up a physical model out of clay as this would be in line with my concept and to render it from here. Anyway, I did all of this and when crit came along one of the panel members said it was a bad choice going with the clay model and then she went on to agree with him, telling me that my design wasn't textural enough but later in the written feedback she stated that the textural quality was it's strength??

I think I am at a point of realising that a lot of the results you get in architecture school are surrounding the marker you get and I'm feeling super frustrated about it. I'm also concerned as I feel like I'm at a point where their harsh marking is impacting my creativity.

Has anyone had a similar experience at university/college? I don’t mean to whine and I’m aware that I’m being pretty self entitled, but I wonder if others have had the same thing happen to them and how they went about resolving it.