Current workload

At the moment I’m generally busy almost every hour of everyday. It hit me a few days ago that I only had 2 months left of university, it actually made me panic. I wrote a time table so I knew exactly what I was meant to be doing every day and to stay on schedule. 

Above is a screenshot of my timetable I created. It’s not that detailed, but I do go over every assignment in the excel document. It’s a rough chart I need to follow, I’m still on time for all my assignments, I just find it easier when I write a time table and plan ahead. I didn’t really need to do this in the first year, I did every assignment in a chronological order or just before deadline time. In second year I didn’t actually need to plan that far ahead, I would generally plan daily what I need to do and revision for exams.

Mistakes in planning…

I wrote a small plan in my second year for exams, this was months before the exams where due to be sat. The issue with this is that I planned to do a bulk of the revision the day before I sat it. That didn’t work out what so ever, I actually was informed by a friend that the exam date was changed weeks ago, so I didn’t realise that the day I planned to do most of my revision was the new day of the exam. So I heard about this exam about 9 hours before sitting it. That’s really bad planning on my behalf and I definitely should have checked to see if the exam dates had changed.

It lead to an all-nighter where I revised the whole unit and only had around 1-2hours sleep before travelling to the exam. Luckily I actually got an A grade for this exam. I wouldn’t recommend revising a day before for any exam, I just have an impressive short term memory plus good attendance in the unit will definitely help.  

What to expect in University Interviews

What to expect

Understand why you are there. They are making sure that you’re firstly academically capable of undertaking the course and if the course is right for you. It’s somewhat like a job interview, it's for the benefit of both parties.

An example of this for me was at one of the universities I visited, if I didn’t have an interview I might have taken this course without releasing exactly what I was getting into. I had an interview with a very kind women who was quizzing me on what I had done in the field and what I want to do. Then she led by telling me about that universities course which was actually different to what the prospectus and website said. I recited what I remember from the website and prospectus just to confirm when she replied with “Yeah, we need to update that.” This is a good example of when an interview benefited me. Otherwise I would have been on a course I didn’t even sign up for, but when there’s a lot of money and time involved it’s actually a huge issue.

That being said, the women did say I was welcome onto the course if I wanted to but after discussing how the course had changed I personally didn’t want to join. That being said, universities have to narrow down applicants so you do need to sell your skills and experience well. It’s not impressive if you are joining a course and have no prior knowledge what so ever. 

Plus all normal interview etiquette apply usually. Gum, clothes manners that normal stuff. Another instance of almost the opposite happening was as mentioned before, I’ve had an exam & interview at one of the universities, this experience was rather nerve-racking. Every other student that was there help an A1-A2 leather folder and there was me… Well, I had a tiny laptop. It was an animation course with both drawing and 3D design. I managed to ace the small exam and interview but I was odd one out. If I could recommend anything it would be prepare. Bring stuff that they might be interested in. For me, I took a video portfolio with me and some stills. But they was interested in some of the specific animations on my portfolio and wanted to see more. Luckily I have a YouTube channel ;) and a website in which I had everything on at the time.

Microsoft Student Partner

I’ve briefly mentioned that I’m a Microsoft Student Partner. I’ll explain what it means, what we do and how to apply.

I’ve been a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) for almost 2 years. It’s a very prestigious program for students passionate about Technology. This doesn’t just mean programmers, I’m a 3D Generalist and I think I fit in well with the program. Although most people in the program, they don’t necessarily study computers science. A good knowledge of Microsoft Products is recommended

How did I get in the program? I personally got in the program I think because of my technical skills, plus staying active in the field. I hold a personal tech blog and attend a lot of tech events. Before I joined I attended a hackathon in Belgium with my good friend at the time who was an MSP.

But Sean, I don’t have money to go to another country and tech events, I’m a student not a millionaire :<. Oh really? It cost me £80. It was really fast to get there too. I’d be happy to do it again, was a really fun experience and I personally don’t think there is an excuse for people not to be attending tech events, even around Europe, I’ve spent more money on weekends out!

In my first year of the program I worked with quite a few of the other MSPs and made some apps and games which were published on the Windows Market places. I did presentations to very technical audiences and built my connections in the field.  Second year I’ve done similar things so far, plus done some far more technical things at events (Such as the 3D printing I spoke about in a previous post).  A full list of events and talks I’ve done is available here. 

If you’re a student, passionate about tech and like Microsoft. Then why not apply!

www.microsoftstudentpartners.com 

Perks? Opportunity for free software, hardware and knowledge. I’ve slept in 5 star hotels, had amazing meals and travel is reimbursed. I can personally warn you that if you don’t take it seriously, then you won’t be taken seriously.

Do your research

As I’ve spoke about in my last blog posts. I’m searching for some master degree courses. I thought of another rather cool tip that I thought I’d share.

Usually when applying for a course, there is some rather simple generic quote saying something like… “This course was really good, I liked the teachers and the equipment available”. This generally doesn’t give you too much information straight away, but if you actually google the person that said the quote, you learn a lot about the university.

I did exactly that, I searched for – Firstname + surname “University name”. This basically gave me everything I needed to know about that certain person. From this, I knew what type of job they had got and basically any trace of work they had done in that course. Sounds a little stalkerish. But you can learn a lot more about the university by the person who had just graduated. So the person I searched up had a rather poor portfolio, didn’t seem to have a big internet footprint and from their public profile seems to be working in a supermarket. Not exactly what you look for when applying for a master’s degree in my opinion.

It’s a little over the top I know, but the prices that degrees cost these days spending 5 minutes searching up someone could save you a huge amount of money in the long run. I know that individual students have different abilities, but it does give you a rough idea of the standards that the course teaches.

Hopefully I haven’t shot myself in the foot by doing this post. Then again my e-footprint is rather huge and technology rated. I come across my blog accidentally sometimes when trying to search up things to do with my field. I can take this a little further and just mention that employees check your online profiles too, so make sure that you know everything that’s out there about you.

Here are some great exaples of what not do