Overall, I'm very happy with my time at UNO. I started taking courses before going back to school full time and I also liked this path, but the University was not so helpful in transferring credits after the fact. Alas. I received a graduate assistantship which awarded me free tuition and a stipend while in school. I taught introductory level courses for 2.5 out of 3 years and also found this to be very rewarding to my education. I was transitioning from another profession and this program was the perfect thing for me to pause, learn how to make films, learn how to be a student again, and reshape how I want my career to look moving forward. This program is absolutely a "what you make from it" kind of program. You can glide through with little effort, or you can work hard on as many projects as possible and build a great film foundation for yourself. I don't like giving the program a star rating, so I'm forgoing that for a longer review here.
The program has been around for a long time and, at the height of the streaming boom, there were UNO undergraduate and graduate alumni working on every major film project in New Orleans and beyond. UNO has a good reputation of producing students that are ready to work on sets that understand protocols, technology, gear, you name it. It's a small school, but if you've met someone on set that went to UNO, I can almost guarantee that it was probably a positive working experience.
Another positive thing that was hard to articulate in a list is that New Orleans is a major film hub and there are (usually) a lot of film productions happening in town. This is great and they usually take (and want!) student interns. When I was in school, this was the case because it was in the middle of the production boom. Nowadays, production has slowed (as it has everywhere), so it's hard for me to say how many interns they are taking on the few productions that are happening now.
All in all, I enjoyed my time in the program. But I'm also happy to answer more specific questions in a DM.
