Getting us to create a career roadmap was surprisingly more useful than I had originally thought. I didn’t really know what I was going to do after I graduated, and I still don’t exactly, but the roadmap has some goals that I have set myself to complete in order to progress my future career. The nice thing about the roadmap is that it’s not something that needs to be completed soon. It can be constantly amended and can span as small or large a time period as you like. Plus, you get the added satisfaction when you reach a milestone on it.
Social media wise, I’m not sure how useful that will be for me. It seems it is mainly used by artists and creatives to show off their work, whereas a programmer isn’t as likely to use it. I have seen how it can be a great publicity tool for game development through short videos on TikTok of a game mechanic or the art style of the game, etc, so maybe I can incorporate social media into my profile later when I have ongoing projects that I want to share the stage of development with others for.
The website lecture didn’t really highlight anything new for me as I believe we had needed to make a website last year for a submission, so I had already looked at the tools for it before. That being said, I hadn’t added much to my website last year. It was more a proof of concept for me for how things would work and be arranged when I did finally populate it with my work.
The skills pack lecture wasn’t great at the time because when you’re put on the spot to think about what skills you have, suddenly you forget every single thing you know. For me, it was better after the fact and as a slow burn because I wasn’t under pressure to think about myself, and I could remember skills as I used them over time. It was still useful to make a skills pack though, because having a list of everything you know how to do and your proficiency in them really helps you to figure out what you can do now and what you want to improve upon. That being said, as it is a self-grading system I was probably quite harsh on myself as I tend to feel my skills are inadequate when thinking about what is probably expected in a job role.
The writing techniques lecture wasn’t that useful to me. Having been taught writing techniques my entire school life pretty much means I have heard the techniques so many times and there’s not really anything new to learn. The funding and grants applications were interesting to learn about though. I didn’t know there was funding for people to just expand their skillset however they want over the timeline they want. That could be a potentially good resource for me to use in the future when I am eligible for the funding.
The CV part of the lecture was nice just because I had no idea how to go about designing a creative CV. All the advice I had been given before in school and other situations was for bland office CVs, so a Word document was all you needed really. Being able to customise the layout fully using InDesign and just having that creativity option is nice.
The showcase prep lecture was very useful as we finally learnt about the event the entire year had been leading up to. It would’ve been nice to have this kind of lecture a bit earlier as the deadlines for the space proposals were coming up already, but better late than never I guess. There wasn’t much for us to use as examples or inspiration for how to use the space seeing as we are the first year of this course. We saw the MA VR course last year, but they were all in a big walkway/room with many others that really limited what they were allowed to do with their space. It also didn’t help that we didn’t have access to the rooms where our spaces would be to feel out the space, and nothing was really decided by the university about the spaces either. They didn’t know if they would be able to move the furniture out of the rooms, which would heavily restrict what we would be able to do in them. We weren’t allowed to drill into the walls so we thought painting would be allowed. Turns out that wasn’t allowed either. We were also supposed to get given the measurements and floorplans of the spaces so we could plan according to the guidelines set out by the university, but we were never given them, so we had to measure them ourselves, guessing at what measurements would be needed in the limited time we had to measure, and obviously forgetting some.