Transfer Student Applications and Portfolio Submissions
External transfer students coming from either a two-year or four-year institution are handled by the Office of Admissions. A portfolio of creative work must also be submitted via the HCAD Transfer & Non Common Application section of SlideRoom. Official transcript(s) must be submitted to the NJIT Office of Admissions.
Transfer students are required to submit a portfolio of creative work as part of the NJIT admissions process. The portfolio will be looked at as only one of a number of factors when evaluating a candidate for admission, and in some instances, a strong portfolio may make the difference in an admission decision.
Transfer applicants may submit work with SlideRoom without using the Common Application.
Students who wish to transfer internally within the Hillier College of Architecture and Design, or from a different college within NJIT, must also submit a portfolio of creative work which may, if appropriate, include work done in courses at NJIT.
NOTE: Separate submissions from transfer students such as syllabi, graphic work, examinations/quizzes, papers, etc. are required from transfer students after admission to determine placement and transfer credit for specific courses, including Foundation Year courses. As soon as a student is admitted as a transfer and has decided to matriculate into the college, he or she should see Ms. Sasha Corchado (corchado@njit.edu) to submit required materials that would facilitate the determination of what transfer credit, if any, may be applied towards the discipline-specific requirements at NJIT.
Portfolio Content and Format
A portfolio should be clear, easy to view, and represent you in the best possible way. We recommend that you include your name in the contents (not just as a filename), describe each work and your intention briefly (one to two lines), include information about media used, the size of the original (if the submission is a scan or photo), and the purpose of the work (class, personal, paid work, etc.). If a single project extends over several image files, please be mindful of how you indicate that continuity.
Portfolios should contain ten to twenty examples of work (Please use the 6 to 25 file setting in SlideRoom). Work must be creative – and created by the applicant. The portfolio may include examples of graphic design, architectural design, photography, furniture design, drawing (any medium or combination of media), painting, watercolor, film/animation, sculpture, etc. We encourage you to scan or photograph work created with traditional media (e.g. pencil drawings/sketches, acrylic or oil paintings, sculpture). Although the college's programs are primarily visual in their orientation, we encourage you to supplement your visual materials with additional samples of work created with a diverse range of media, including recorded samples of performance art (e.g. acting, singing, dancing), originally composed music and creative written work such as screenplays and poetry.
The college places a premium on good submissions over a variety of media for admission. In other words, show us your critical abilities in selecting your best work and do your best to submit more than one kind of project. In some instances, a quick gestural sketch can show your skill as effectively as a more time-intensive piece. We encourage you to provide us with examples of close observation through freehand field sketching and photography. We are looking for evidence of visual understanding and the creative spark that motivates you.
We emphasize that your portfolio contain creative work by you and discourage copying that of others, such as characters you’ve seen in cartoons, graphic novels, television shows, or motion pictures. We also discourage your including manual or computer-aided drafting or rendering as proof of drafting competency alone; we will only consider these examples if produced in the service of a creative design.
SlideRoom requires you to upload individual images that it generates into a single portfolio. Please save single images in JPG format using minimal compression (maximum quality) to avoid unwanted visual artifacts that compromise the quality of your work. Submit any animations in MPG and/or AVI formats. Make sure that any file you save has an extension e.g. .jpg, .mpg (be aware that Mac Operating Systems developed by Apple do not always do this automatically). You should design the portfolio and organize the viewing sequence; do not rely on default alphabetical file names.