Please! BEWARE of BIMM and their Mickey Mouse degrees

Before I get into this rant, I'm relaying my personal experience with this university. I've also got to say that the tutors at the BIMM I attended were kind, friendly, well-meaning, and knowledgable. I had a positive relationship with all of them and have nothing against them on a personal basis. Professionally, I do.

Were they providing the value you'd expect for the extortionate fee you're paying? In the words of Leo in the Wolf of Wall Street: Absolutely f***ing not. Will this apply to every BIMM in the UK? Maybe not. But if this is what they deem an acceptable way to run a uni, I wouldn't be surprised.

The counter-intuitive curriculums they were forced to adhere to did not help, for one.

The lecturers themselves, though, were more concerned about running the clock down on their classes so they can get back to their personal lives than equipping you with the skill set necessary to carve a tough career in music. For the first two years, for example, we spent the first half an hour of one module discussing what everyone got up to on the weekend, one by one.

On countless occasions, they'd kill as much time as possible by making us 'discuss in pairs' and feeding back to the class to eat up large chunks of the lecture. When the fact is: no-one knows sh*t, that's why we're paying through the nose to be in this classroom. They constantly floated questions with the most obvious answers (e.g. so what do we know about gigs?) and have us all sit in there in uncomfortable silence until people start reeling off arbitrary thoughts to be inscribed on a flip chart like its the ten commandments.

They clog every curriculum with pointless academia for the mere sake of checking boxes. I felt awful for the songwriters and performers who were being made to critically analyse 70s music in 3500-word essays without a single justification of how that'll help their career. Essentially, you learn what you need to to fulfil their self-contained criteria. Transferrable skills take a distant backseat to rigorously training your mind to think and write like an academic essayist.

Any practical skills you might be given the opportunity to develop are spread wafer-thin with a 'jack-of-all-trades' approach, with the justification that you need a wider skill set in today's world.

It's simply a gross oversight to fluff out their offerings. The music industry is packed with people who are f***ing good at what they do. Good luck with being just okay at 7 different things because BIMM said so.

My course was picked apart and adjusted over the 3 years on a trial-and-error basis. Each one was marginally less shambolic than the last. It's the educational equivalent of flinging sh*t at a wall and seeing what sticks, and you pay for the failed experiments.

We were given handouts from books that, if you gave a sh*t about what you were there for you would have already read, and then being told to read it in silence for up to 15-20 mins at a time. The teaching style is ultra laid-back with a loose grasp on where the minutes go, and little interest in invigorating students in the slightest.

Honestly, the lecturers could give two sh*ts outside of the time they get paid for. They treat it like an office job. More often than not, these people have enjoyed only minor success in the music industry, got sick of the instability of freelancing their trade, and took up the opportunity to teach others how to follow the same mediocre footsteps instead. If they were that good at what they do, I'm sure they wouldn't be sacrificing it to lounge about in a classroom flicking through recycled powerpoints.

If you really want to be the music business, save your money and invest in your craft and perhaps marketing. Don't get caught in this bear trap like I did. No matter what they try to and sell you, remember that this is a business, just like anything else. They are the shining example of the threadbare, mickey mouse courses that officials have criticised over and over but can't legally act on. If I'd stockpiled evidence or some kind of record of their abhorrent approach to education, I'd consider suing.

But I didn't, so I've let it go. I'm not on a quest for revenge for anything like that, I just feel like I need to seriously warn people. You'll probably spend between 45-60k with maintenance loans and all getting a degree from this place. And that's all you'll get. There isn't a soul on earth who could justify that kind of cash for what BIMM has to offer.

Really, if you're a creative, go and watch YouTube videos, get good at what you do and start putting yourself out there. If you think BIMM can offer you anything you can't do yourself for a fraction of the cost (and probably time), that is one mistake I hope you won't have to pay like I did to find out.

I hope some people take this into consideration before making their choice. Thanks for reading.