All earthly mortals herald the arrival of Platinum Mech's most laboured Fine Art student sibling.

Perhaps I can offer an angle on the nuances of a very singular subject as a BA (Hons) Fine Art student at the Cleveland College of Art & Design, Middlesbrough. Any accompanying talk on those cuckoo London-domiciled sorts shall have to be momentarily neglected. Until I can make my own investigations down there come MA level, perhaps.
I was actually an entrant on my own BA (Hons) programme direct from A-Level, not the most prodigiously treaded-on of paths - and what I
can do is vouch for the sentiments of a previous poster declaring many students to harbour a decidedly slack attitude to their studies. What with the considerable swathes of the student body performing a curious day-to-day 'disappearing act' once the most spurious reference to hard graft crops up, even if a student 'family' rapport exists, they remain, relative to yourself, rather more the obscure aunties and uncles, than brothers and sisters. Still, within of the confines of CCAD, at least, subject 'intensity' remains pleasingly subject to your own whims. There seem to have been few obstacles to me, an exuberant drawing and painting 18-year old, rapidly adapting to the rigour of such HE-level scholarly abandon.

And 'abandon' it indeed is. The lack of direct tutor intervention does make for a rather ragged course of study and you can be liable to drift into spates of thumb-twiddling inactivity should you not take all the initiatives going (optional weekly life-drawing classes; student-organised exhibitions; visiting artists/tutors et al). Conquer that, and Fine Art is as fulfilling and pivotal to one's academic fulfillment as any to revolve around libraries and textbooks. But it all hinges on you.
Phew. So, yes. I've uttered in a multi-paragraph deliberative frenzy what many would happily shoehorn into a series of scrawled notes.

And the 'one essay a term' fable's no lie, either. On first-year evidence, anyway.