Week 9

This week a group of graduates from the ITCD program came to talk to us. Actually when most of them graduated it wasn't ITCD, and one was from the master's program, MSIT I think is what it's called. Even though none of them held positions that I'm particularly interested in, I still found their advice to be very useful.

One piece of advice they gave was to make an effort to learn as much as you can in your classes. In my classes this semester, I've only been doing just enough to get good grades. I'm not exactly sure how to go about learning more, maybe if I try and apply the concepts to the real world. I do find that I sometimes space out during class, and when I tune back in I've missed so much that I get lost. I'll start sitting closer to the front and find a way to keep my energy up to avoid this. They also advised us to network. Some of the graduates mentioned that they received most of their jobs because someone referred them, or put in a good word.

We also had a chance to ask the panel some questions. One question that was asked was, which class was the most useful in preparing for their career. All of them said the Instructional Design class, which I've never heard of before. I hope they still offer it here, because it seems they learned in that class that they could apply to their careers now.

Week 8

This week in class the career center coordinator came and talked to us about the career center and the resources they provide. One of the things that caught my attention was the career fair they hold in the Spring. They also provide different "quizzes" that would determine a good career path for you, or help you decide what's important to you. I also learned that there are a lot of different factors when choosing a career. The most important one is choosing a career that interests you. Others would be location and work hours. The coordinator and Dr. Tao also went over planning a career. I was confused in the beginning of class as to what "planning" a career was. But now I think it's choosing a career, and planning out the steps to get you there.

What are the specific actions you can do between now and the time you graduate to enhance your career opportunity?
One thing would be to get an internship and some real world experience in my career of choice, which is software engineering or video game programming. Another is networking, with my classmates and maybe some professionals already in the industry (although I haven't figured out how I would do that yet). Another is doing side projects on my own to improve my programming knowledge and skills. I'm actually working on a side project right now, an asteroids game clone. I'm programming it with C++ and SFML(a media library for C++).

Week 7

For class on week 7, Dr. Tao lectured about how to run effective meetings. To have a meeting be effective we need an agenda before the meeting starts, someone taking minutes and a moderator to make sure everyone stays on topic. I'd never though about any of these things, but I'm glad he went over it so now we won't be wasting any time in meetings.

He also put us in groups based on our major and career interests. I put my capstone/career interests as game programming, so I was put in a group that were also interested in developing games. Then he told us that in our groups we would be researching the technology of our choice. I'm glad we were put into groups based on similar career interests/major because it was easy coming up with technologies everyone was interested in. I think we came up with a lot of great topic ideas and am looking forward to research any one of them.

We also had to create a SMART goal for our degree plan. I had a pretty hard time making it as long as the minimum requirement, but here's my SMART goal.

I want to finish all my required classes, and learn as much as I can in those classes, by the end of Spring 2012 and graduate with a 3.5 GPA or higher. I also want to take one class outside of my major that interests me. I want to gain efficient programming and communication skills from my classes that will make me stand out when applying for a job as a software engineer or as a video game programmer after I graduate. For my capstone, I want to produce a game that allows me to explore and understand the process of both software development and game development, display my programming skills, and possibly implement some form of artificial intelligence.

Post for class last Thursday, September 30th

Last week, Eric Tao went over effective project management. Some key points to making a project successful is communication between group members, good documentation and understanding the goal of the customer. The three features of a project are time, features and cost. To better one of those features, meaning decreasing time, better quality of features or lowering cost, you have to sacrifice one of the others. Some things that could lead to a failed project are no communication, no motivation, poorly defined goals, lack of resources, managing workload and personality conflicts.

Pat Watson then gave a little spiel of the program he's in charge of, Digital animation and 3D modeling. The majority of his presentation was a demo reel of student work, which was really impressive. If I were a freshmen still deciding on a major, I would've probably picked that then and there. I don't think I have enough creativity to go far with 3D modeling and animation anyways...

Dr. Tao also went over what SMART goals were. SMART stands for specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and time-framed goals. I can see why a goal needs all these things to be an effective one. One example he used is a common new years goal I set for myself, to be healthier. That is very vague, and has no specific time frame. If I were to say, I want to eat at least one fruit and vegetable everyday for a month, that would be a smart goal. If that goal would actually change my eating habits after a month is another story though....