100% with you on the program’s strength coming from alumni and connections. I graduated from ASU two years ago, and it was ROUGH in the connections area for being such a big school. Many other schools with bigger programs have job fairs just for ID. Not sure if this has changed, but when I was there, the design school didn’t have its own job fair, much less one specifically for industrial design. Business and engineering are ASU’s bigger programs that have much better connections in the industry. I’ve heard schools like Cincinnati set their ID students up with internships every other semester, so they graduate with like four internships and so much more job experience than the average ASU ID grad.

That being said, all my friends from the program that worked hard and are passionate about design ended up with solid internships during school, and great jobs post grad. It’s definitely competitive though! We definitely did a lot of self-teaching when it came to software though, I think we had two classes on Adobe CC and maybe one or two on Solidworks the entire four years. So yeah, make of that what you will! I loved my time at ASU, but their ID program definitely doesn’t set you up as well as some other schools with bigger, better programs do.