Well it is clear that brightside has not been to architecture school yet.

It's "shenanigans" or "tomfoolery", not mischief.

I have been working for a little while in three seperate cities and I have yet to meet someone who actually knows what the hell Sci-Arc is. Granted, I'm on the east coast so I would say it's reputation here is well, among the lowest.

i went to the university of texas, and while i did not do so -- i knew a lot of people who missed out on frat parties, school spirit, sporting events, kegs, and college misch--er, shenanigans and tomfoolery.

i personally partook of all those (minus the tomfoolery, i am more a hijinks man myself).

but the benefit of going to a place like UT is that you have the choice...whereas i somehow doubt sci-arc has a guy named slinky whose frat brother rico got so drunk that he passed out on top of slinky for such a long time that slinky "got his arm amputated"

(a charming "true story" related to me at an abortive rush party when i was semi-seriously considering joining a fraternity. i ended up never rushing a fraternity, but i did drink their beer for free at parties until i got a pair of tiny tortoise-shell glasses...i looked normal in contacts)

School is for learning design - that's what I say. It really depends whether you want to go to a school that teachers theory or the techtonics of building stuff.

I think if job or vocation preparation is what you are chiefly considering, SCI-Arc may not be your best option. My reason is simple: job fairs and networking. There are many progressive (and aggressive) practitioners teaching at SCI-Arc but one must realize that many of them are simply just starting out, experimenting and trying to get their practice going among other reasons. Furthermore, the school holds no job fairs in the most general sense of the word, and unlike some of the bigger universities around, systematically compile your resumes and then send them out to firms who work with these departments to get new recruits. One can of course dispute that such firms employ cad monkies but at least they pay and given the basis of a 'first' job, who cares? As compared to the option of joblessness, this is a better option in my own opinion.

Mad tomfoolery!

If you want to stay and work in LA you'll have no problem getting a job. There are 30(?!?) years worth of alumni in the city, that's enough time to be more than just starting out and most of them seem to be willing to hire you just to hear stories about what crazy thing Mangurian, Kulper, Howard, etc did while you where there. From my time in LA it seemed that every firm/ office in the city has a SCI-Arc alum in some position with a reasonable amount of power/ responsibility. (At least the firms I was interested in.)

The school certainly does have a reputation for being kind of a blue sky/ unrealistic designy place. But I'd rather be pigeon holed as the design guy than the cad guy.

I'm just glad you didn't put SCI-Arc in quotation marks. If you have to choose though, I'd go with Chuck Norris.

I know a guy that got his undergrad at SCIArc and ended up working for Rem Koolhaas afterwards - I don't know if his connections were through the school or independent of it. He also drank like a fish, which I can only imagine he picked up/continued whilst an undergrad at SCIArc... but that's beside the point. He then went on (after working for a bit) to the GSD in order to "round out" his education - ie: give it a more practical approach. I think his view was that you learn and explore more at a place like SCIArc (if the conceptual is what you fancy), however an Ivy education might allow you to be more "employable" initially. But again, look at who he worked for post SCIArc and just as an undergrad...