Career Development

            Career development is a topic that is thoroughly close to my heart as I would very much prefer to have a career over simply a job like many others do.  Additionally in my line of work as a communication design major career development goes hand in hand with personal brand development, another major interest of mine.  Doctor Tao mentioned a plethora of valued and interesting options for career starting points and possible areas of advancement.  It was interesting to hear Tao’s point of view and information about the various means and methods of starting one’s career in comparison to the advice of the alumni a couple weeks previous.  I do wish Doctor Tao had touched more on internships, in particular some of the troubling stories I’ve heard from friends, colleagues, and mentors about the way internships can be used to farm talent as it were.  Though I’m sure there are any number of serviceable internships that serve to give you a foot in the door at a company I’ve heard a fair share of horror stories about unpaid internships that exist solely to get as much work out of students as humanly possible while giving them as little back as possible with no hiring at the end of the experience.  I personally am more inclined towards the freelance and self-sufficient approach to career development as it’s more compatible with my own goals and life template.  Options like developing my own games, doing freelance 3D modeling for clients, and case-by-case communications work strikes me as a preferable approach to developing my professional resume and personal brand than slaving a way at a permanent post if only because of the autonomy afforded you through freelancing and personal projects grants a greater chance for personal achievements and accomplishments.  To me that’s what a career is in essence, a collection of accomplishments that speak to your skills and capabilities.  I do of course recognize and acknowledge the risks of this approach and in particular the enhanced work demands of approaching a career from a more independent position but I feel the personal and professional gains far outweigh the risks. 

Graduation Process

            If I may candid here at the start I had no idea how complex the graduation process was.  I had initially simply assumed that if someone simply had the credits they would be awarded a diploma upon completion of the necessary classes.  In fact I have to wonder if all the perfunctory hoops that graduates need to jump through are truly necessary beyond just cementing that it is their intention to graduate and leave the university.  I understand some requirements of the graduation process such as the capstone project.  Making sure that graduates from majors like communication design or computer science or even televisual arts have a large portfolio of work to display to perspective clients and employers is a noble goal and one that permeates nearly every aspect of these majors and the capstone serves as the pinnacle of that goal.  But some of these other aspects of the process feel a bit like artificial goal markers inserted to inflate the process or if I were feeling uncharitable; restrict student’s opportunities for graduation to prolong their attendance to the university.  Other aspects come off like leftovers, outdated and vestigial procedures from a previous that really should be streamlined out of the graduation process given the advent of superior technologies that could easily expedite the process.  All speculation and griping aside however this was a thoroughly informative presentation that really conveyed to me the structure of the graduation process and everything that I need to do to complete this process.  Though my own graduation isn’t until spring of 2016 I recognize the importance of early preparation to ensure the process of graduating is a decidedly smooth and easy one, after all there’s no telling if I might find a way to expedite my own goals and graduate earlier than 2016 in which case being prepared is very important.   

Alumni Presentation

            The alumni presentation was a fascinating and thoroughly rewarding experience.  It was a great opportunity to hear about real people who made the real transition from students here at CSUMB to the workforce.  With the growing economic instability that still plagues our job market a future beyond school can often seem daunting and more than a little intimidating but hearing how well these alumni were able to parlay their education and natural skills into major careers really helped allay those fears.  I especially liked hearing from Christina V. Ferrante.  She was the alumni who started her own creative consulting business working towards brand development and promotion for athletes and other sports professional.  I really respected her determination and self sufficiency, creating your own business and maintaining that business are some of the hardest career options to follow but there also ones that I am thoroughly interested in pursuing myself.  Hearing Christina talk about how she handles the pressures of achieving her life goals as well as pursuing growth and evolution for the company she created was truly inspiring.  It was also incredibly refreshing to hear from a creative professional from the Communication Design major.  Sometimes it can feel like the communication design major exists solely to prop the computer science majors and make their projects more accessible to the outside world so it was good to hear first hand from a CD major who went on to do her own thing ultimately separate from the world of information technology and computer science.  Erik Uppman of Sixty Eight West was also interesting; his story of gaining experience and networking was very enlightening.  It helped to really drive home the importance of knowing other individuals to achieve your own objectives rather than the far too pervasive stereotype of both creatives and programmers as solitary individuals who work in ultimate isolation.  It really puts the importance of community and teamwork in sobering perspective. 

Learning Journal 6: Social Media in the Classroom

This was certainly an interesting experience seeing an attempt to integrate social media into the classroom.  On the one hand I see the appeal of this approach, especially in a large classroom environment where it can be difficult for the teacher to connect with every student and get every viewpoint.  However it’s important to remember that such integration must be careful controlled and planned.  It was obvious the live tweeting of our ideas on teamwork wasn’t as well conceived as it could’ve been given the anonymous nature of the medium we used it was far too easy to turn the proceedings into a caption contest.  I didn’t really feel that this was a good use of class time, especially given how similar our views on teamwork were.  It strikes me that what was really needed here was something to really encourage us to break the mold, maybe an activity that paired up different groups in a team working activity that we would deconstruct afterwards to determine how well teamwork worked in action as in the abstract all our ideas remain perfect but execution is the true indicator of their effectiveness.  Alternatively I could see something more geared towards getting truly out of the box concepts on teamwork forward, as I mentioned pretty much everyone had the same basic answers to the teamwork questions about communication, resources, understanding each other, basically a group-think consensus on what team work is.  It would be interesting to try and chip past that outer shell of assumption and really develop a deeper, freer understanding of the concept not limited by our ideas of consensus. 

Learning Journal 5: Where communication meets computers

This is something that's been hanging over my time in this class like a bad smell, a visible funk that fills the classroom every Thursday at 10AM that I can't ignore any longer because this week it was at its most intense.  This class is meant to act as a combination class both for CSIT major and CD majors yet I constantly feel like CD majors end up on the seriously short end of that stick, we’re the second class citizens it feels like, the homeless guys who were magnanimously invited to CSIT’s thanksgiving.  For instance look at this project we’re currently working on and how Dr. Tao phrases the terms of the project “select a subject that’s important to the major,” not the MAJORS, not YOUR major, but THE major, the one single major that everyone is considered to be part of.  My group ended up with the subject of cloud computing yet I’m a CD major with an emphasis in 3D modeling, this is not something I should be spending my time on because it’s not actually important to my career path.  Even the terms of the project itself work exclusively off the idea that you’re the kind of code monkey whose going to hack out a plan for your programming, nothing to do with designing interfaces, visual aesthetics, graphics, or anything else related to the people who are here as communication design majors.  There’s a whole segment of my project that needs to be devoted to the risks of cloud computing and I don’t see that has anything to do with me, I’m not going to be designing any cloud networks, at most I might be hiring someone else too and at that point THEY would know about the threats of cloud computing, that’s why I’d hire THEM.  You don’t insist that the Bio majors to projects on quantum mechanics but demanding CD majors throw together network security presentations is somehow better?