This is on a little bit of a personal note as well but I thought that it would be worth sharing. Right now is the beginning of the fall time and this is the time when people are beginning to go back to school and start up class again. Now, I am currently out of school and working so this does not really affect me nearly as much as I am currently working but the timeline naturally fits to create some fall goals for myself.
Whether you are in school or out of school, as a developer, it is a great idea to create term goals for yourself to help you accomplish things you seek to complete. This is also a very important thing if you want to become a Technical Director, Artist, etc.
One thing that I have learned being out of school and being in the work force for a little over a year, is that your “school” work doesn’t prove to the companies out there that you are a competent worker and can fulfill yourself. These are done through your personal projects and most of the efforts that you perform outside of school.
As a technical director, the companies that I applied for were not asking me about my grades and what I learned in school. They asked about some of the projects that I have worked on that involved communicating with a team and the roles that we played to create an effective environment for accomplishing a task.
Now, this isn’t to say that this can come from school as well. When I interview with Rhythm & Hues for an opportunity as a pipeline technical director, my projects from my Scientific Visualization class really shined as much of it was python based and showed them that I can create tools to visualize data. I was lucky enough to find a class where the professor gave us the freedom to create our own projects and own research to receive a grade.
One thing I want to point out, is to not just do things for the grade. The grade only lasts for the semester and won’t take you much further. The content, however, will take you much further. If you are in a computer science class learning python and algorithms, why not take what you learn and create your own projects that visualize the algorithms?
In turn, take some time to create a fall goal list that does not pertain directly to school work. Look at your classes and try to look at how you can apply those into your personal projects. If you are taking a programming languages course, why not create a lexical analyzer to analyze a toy language?
If you have any questions, follow and ping me on Twitter- I’m twitter.