Put advice and links to resources for new students here.

Welcome to Concordia University. It's a scary place. When you enter the program, there will be no hand offered by the administration to guide you. This document is created by current CART students for you. You will find words of wisdom from upper-class-men, advice about professors and courses, links to resources, and maybe some other stuff...

[This document is publicly editable. Please edit responsibly.]

Words of Wisdom

Dan:

"I think that the number #1 thing that you must realize as a new Computation Arts student is that this is NOT a technical course on web design/photoshop/flash. You will use these things, and will probably cover them in some of your classes, but YOU MUST LEARN THE TECHNICAL SIDE OF THESE PROGRAMS YOURSELF! You will learn many amazing interesting things in this program, but it is incredibly broad in scope, and the professors do not have the time to teach you how to use Photoshop. 

It took me most of first year to realize this, but the sooner you come to the realization, the better. If you have any idea or goal of doing professional or semi-professional web design/graphic design, you will need a extremely large technical skill set, and you should start learning as soon as possible.

CART, as a program, in my humble opinion, is exactly what it says it is. Computional Art. Art, created by computers. I believe the sooner you start thinking about this program as the equivilant of Painting or Sculpture, except with electronics as your tools and palate, the more you will get out of this program. Anybody with motivation and a book can learn how to use Photoshop, and lets be honest, to succed in whatever you do after university, be it the life of a artist, or a career in design, it will be the creative, artistic side of your work that is valuable. Jobs that require only technical skills end up in India. That being said, anything that you do creatively needs to be supported by solid technical ability. So go buy a good book, or do some tutorials, start practising as soon as possible."

Jos:

Under no circumstances should you PANIC. Certain classes can be quite daunting (261 or 255) for certain students, and you may end up thinking about dropping them. Don't. The idea here is that you get to tackle things that you  never would of done so on your own accord in  the first place. There are tons of available ressources AND generally, teachers are much willing  to help you out as much as they can if you  are having  trouble. There's nothing like acomplishing something  that you thought would be an unsurmountable task. And as always...ASK  QUESTIONS if you dont understand something.

Mohannad:

The main issue in care is that it covers so many fields at once. Many people graduate and then realize that they know a bit of everything but not enough about 1 field to get a decent job. You need to understand that Cart is pretty open, it is up to you to choose which field(s) ou are most interested in and which profs you share that interest and go after them. My Advice is to take a bit of everything over the first year and second year, try to choose the field you enjoy the most over the second year so you can spend the 3rd year doing it. Most of the third year classes and the profs who teach them are pretty open to the interest of students. You also might want to save your fine arts electives till you make that dicision. If you are interested in 3D, you can take Digital sculpture classes, 3D dart classes, or even ceramics and drawing classes.

Professors 

Joanna Berzowska

• http://www.xslabs.net
• http://berzowska.com

Christopher Salter

• http://www.chrissalter.com
• http://www.airxy.org

Sha Xin Wei

• http://topologicalmedialab.net
• http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei

PK Langshaw

Jason Lewis

• http://www.obxlabs.net

Vincent Leclerc

• http://uttermatter.com
• http://eskistudio.com

Brad Todd

Valerie Lamontagne

Valerie Walker

Alison Reiko Loader

Santo Romano

Alumni 

At design.concordia.ca

• http://design.concordia.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=95

Vincent Leclerc

• http://uttermatter.com
• http://eskistudio.com

Marcelo Coelho

• http://web.media.mit.edu/~marcelo

Resources

• http://computationarts.concordia.ca/ [the official Computation Arts web-page. Not very useful. The course descriptions are vague and sometimes outdated. I recommend that you ask about classes on the list and contact the professors beforehand in order to get an idea of what you're in for.]
• Computation Lab [the Computation Lab exists to help you with programming. It is no longer run by Sean Braithwaite. Oh well. He's a great guy, get to know him. And although he isn't getting paid to do it anymore, I'm sure he'd love to help you with your coding problems.]
• Sensor Lab [the Sensor Lab exists to help you with electronics. They have lots of tools and parts. It's run by Elio who's a great guy. Get to know him too.]
  
• DATA
• DMSA