Educational majors

[Murphie]

Re: Educational majors

I shouldn't have used the term game design/programming. It was a bad choice, and is clearly drawing focus away from what the point was, which was that if you're not sure that design or programming are your strong suits, then you can still work in the industry you're interested in, by getting a degree of a different sort and narrowing your job search focus to companies in that industry.

[WishMaster3K]

Re: Educational majors

I hate math. But I'm a junior in the Network Engineering program at my school. I like computers. I like networking. So. Yeah. Much win. Hurray!

And besides, I can have computers do all the math for me.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Educational majors

Have a bunch of systems. They don't have to be expensive (i got a lot of 10 of ebay once for $10) but they do have to work. Free VMware makes this easier but you need slightly beefier hosts, you save on power though.
Use them. Reading about stuff doesn't mean you learned it.

When should I look in to getting said systems? Also, the "a lot of 10 of ebay for $10" is difficult to understand.

You will have a lot of 'What If' questions that you won't be able to explore in your more or less directed studies so you would have to do it on your own, so do so. Once you're out of school you're going to have to keep up with things and products on your own anyway.

Take the hard route and do things manually yourself. Just don't test things on your main machine, that way it doesn't matter what breaks (you can still get into FFXI).

/em takes notes

Don't aim to be a generalist, it doesn't work, but don't narrow yourself so much either. Programming and Administration for instance are very different things, focus on the one you want to do. Know about both, but focus on one. However, System and Database administration are not as different. To do one, you should know a little about the other. So you don't want to focus so narrowly that you're good when sitting infront of Windows 2003 but useless with anything else. (you can still get jobs like that but damn, if your going to do it, do it right).

Not too general, but not too narrow, either. Okay. (And I'll be sure to do it right. )

Oh, and don't care about grammar nazis, most of what you'll be typing won't be english anyway.

I've done a little bit of Programming in the past (before they stopped teaching the class at my school >_> ), so I think I see what you mean.

It's preferable not to, 'Game Programming' courses are to narrowly focused.

Though this doesn't concern me directly, I'll be sure to take note of that as well.



Anyways, thanks for the info, it may end up helping a lot.

[Mhurron]

Re: Educational majors

When should I look in to getting said systems? Also, the "a lot of 10 of ebay for $10" is difficult to understand.

A lot is a group for one price. I got 10 32bit Sun Sparc systems for $10.

Anyway, look where ever you can find cheap stuff. Anything over 350MHz with PCI slots works fine and will run any BSD and Linux (as long as it's not Ubuntu or some other desktop oriented distro) and Windows 2000 just fine.

So either E-Bay or local garage sales and things like that for cheap gear, or get some more recent expensive stuff (1.5GHz+) and run VMware on it and turn one system into several.

If you're going into administration using VMware may end up helping more then you think. Solaris is also free now, if you're interested in learning Unix you can use the most popular commercial Unix at home. And yes, it's very different then Linux.

Also, sign up for things like Technet e-mail bulletins. They'll highlight interesting things on the vendors site, but more importantly you'll get invites to events and free one day product seminars. Go to them, they can be an opportunity to meet people in the area who do the same things and you do get a chance to hear and ask questions about products from someone who (supposedly) has prepared on that product or service. You can also sometimes get free stuff.

Remember you're learning doesn't end when you get out of school, so a little home lab will come in handy later as well.