Graduation and what’s next?

Next week is graduation day and generally the last time I'll see and speak to most of my peers and lecturers. Though I can imagine I’ll keep in contact with a 10 or so, it’s realistically the last time you’ll see everyone together. People move back home in most cases around the country and in some cases back to their home country.  It’s a great opportunity to reminisce and socialise although I personally won’t be attending mine because of costs.

I think this time tells a lot about a student. Speaking to quite a lot of my peers almost all of them haven’t even opened 3Ds Max (Main program we used for uni) and I think it clearly shows those who were actually passionate about the course and their career. At the moment my timetable is 10 hours’ 3Ds Max a day, 6 days a week. I'm planning to give my portfolio a huge boost with my skills in the next few weeks.

I enjoy doing it and sometimes in my assigned breaks I’ll be still working on projects. Though in the meantime I've been accepted to 3 different scholarships at 2 different universities. This means if I decided that industry isn't right for me at the moment then I’ll carry on with education.

I think the perfect job for me would to be working in a small 3D animation studio and I think I'm ready for that. I’ll polish up my portfolio in the next few weeks and be sending it to a certain few companies that’d love to work at.

I think this applies to any computer science course, work on your portfolio. It’s 100% your portfolio that counts. Your degree will only matter when being compared to someone who doesn't have one. 

Finished University!

I’ve finally finished university, it’s been a long hard 3 years. Though I’ve enjoyed it, I’m glad it’s finished. The stage I’m at now is a very awkward one. I’m in a zone where I’m unsure of my near future, I have no idea if I will be doing further study because of waiting for results for my degree and also applications.

This is very similar to when I finished my A levels and a situation I don’t recall positively about. Generally as a teenager everything has certainty, so you know you’re generally going to progress into next year if you do sufficiently, whereas the gap from sixth form to degree is so much different. You can do sufficiently and even go beyond recommended requirements. Even still, there is such an uncertainty as your college or university may not even accept you because of alternative reasons. I’m again in this uncertain situation where I don’t know what I will be doing. I’m relieved from the units of university and appreciate the time now that I’ve got to relax, but I’m only delaying the inevitable search for the next step. Which can be another degree, an internship or even a job. 

Though it’s not uncommon to wait a few years to do a master degree and it’s in fact even more common to do a PhD once working in the field for a while. Keeping this into consideration and not over applying for jobs/positions is also key.