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So, it’s been ten days again since I last blogged and while I do have a few things I want to discuss, I thought I’d get this one out:

It’s once again the last week of a term, midterms are coming up (well, one anyway) and our current project is due to be presented in a few days, too. We’ll see how that goes … I’m hoping good, but I’m prepared for bad too.

So, currently when you switch on the TV or read any newspaper, you’re guaranteed to come across someone talking about how little time we have and how precious it is and all …

If you ask me, we don’t have little time, we just choose to spend it the wrong way. As a student, I know that I “waste” loads of sparetime during the last week of a project because I choose to procrastinate quite a long time; granted, it works out every single time, but I’m certain that I’d have more free time and less stress if I’d start finishing stuff earlier.

Then again, it seems that when I create stuff last-minute, I always come up with stuff I’m happy with. I’ve talked to other students and I know they feel the same way. My guess is that this is just the way creative people choose to work and to be honest, this way of working has advantages too.

If you prepare stuff weeks up front, you’ll not be able to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into your article, presentation, discussion, simply because you don’t know up front what’s gonna happen.

Moreover, if you start out too early, your creation might lack “depth”. I’d like to take an essay I wrote a year ago as an example. The task was to discuss a media landscape, I choose the SciFi Channel, finished my text three (!) weeks up front and ended up rewriting the whole piece from scratch the night before it was due, turns out the text I wrote during the second pass was something I’m really proud of, while the text I wrote up front was sub-par.

So, while in general it might seem like a bad idea, it seems to be a very acceptable (and already accepted) way for creative people to create stuff. Granted, you sacrifice loads of sparetime in the last days prior to the deadline, but then again, you already used that sparetime up front anyway.

[UPDATE]:

Jack seems to be experiencing a similar problem, having too little time to do stuff he likes.

Ten days ago, I attended an edu-fair as a student advisor. Thinking back, it was probably one of the most interesting experiences I had while performing any job I had so far. The team was great, the aura was great and we had lots of fun. In essence, that’s all you need to have a good time.

Yesterday, I attended another edu-fair, again, as a student advisor and I was actually looking forward to it. I was hoping that we could top the amount of fun we had last time, help more people and get to know some more people, but alas - the experience was rather … disappointing.

A few years ago, back when I was about to decide which college to go to, my options were a purely artistic college and a rather young college, with courses focussed towards communication and multimedia design.

Since I don’t really see myself as an “analogue artist” but rather a digital one, I opted for the second one. Sometimes I think back, how it could have been. After all, the first mentioned college trained some of the Netherlands most famous artists and to be allowed to join those ranks would be something great certainly. Either way, I don’t regret my decision and I’m proud to be a “CMD student”.

Back on topic, yesterday I got my first chance to talk to a tutor from the artists college and gosh … that lady has some serious issues. Sure, their college is great, many great people graduated there, but I don’t personally consider that a reason to rant about other colleges. No matter if they’re part of your own college group (like my college) or not.

There are many reasons why you shouldn’t do it, a few of them being that it is immature, very unprofessional and that it’s just plain wrong, yet that tutor decided that her college was better than others and felt obligated to carry out her verbal battle with me in front of a possible future student. She went on about how students from my college are less artistic and less creative and how their students are the true Picassos, Van Goghs etc.

I discussed this issue with a few students (from my college) and all of them agree that her behaviour was plain wrong. I personally think that the student in question wont join us next year, after all - the first impression he got from our school was that we like to bitch.

Now, if that lady decides to rave about her own college, I’d like her to go right ahead, but she shouldn’t do it at the cost of our, or any other college, for that matter.

As if that wasn’t enough, their stand was also the only one that didn’t fit the CI of our 9 other stands. She decided that their stand deserved loads of posters and empty soda cans on the table, even though we were told to make sure that all stands looked as clean and inviting as possible at any time during the fair.

That said, all in all the fair was less disappointing than that incident but still not great. Most people weren’t really motivated to promote their courses in an interesting way and I’m quite sure that most people interested in our college were getting a totally wrong impression.

So, if you’re one of the people who stopped by yesterday and think that our college isn’t really “gezellig” and just blows, I apologize. Feel free to come to one of our walk-in days, for example the one on November 18th, 2006. We’ll be present with a great team from 10 am till 3 pm and you’ll be able to experience our “chemistry”.

If you know anything about marketing, you should be familiar with the term “multiplier”. No, I’m not talking about the factor that makes your marketing efforts more and more expensive based on the amount of users you want to reach but rather about a very special kind of evangelists - so called “multipliers”.

Every company has a different approach for this concept and the one that I liked the most recently was Nikon’s promotional campaign for the new D80.

If you decide to give your product to users and you go for the well-known crowd, like A-List bloggers or decision makers, you lose a lot of credibility, in my eyes. Nikon seems to agree - they gave their new digital SLR to a handful of the most active Flickr users and let them play around with it.

I really like the results. Good job Nikon!

Virtual hat tip to BlueAce.

a person approaches the stand I share with three other guys, he’s looking at our folders, afraid to make eye contact with anyone of us. It’s obvious - he wants information but is afraid to ask:

Hi there, can I help you with anything?

This is how most conversations this weekend started. No, I wasn’t trying to sell the new VA-QUME CleanR, I was actually promoting computer sciences and especially my own faculty on the first trade fair targeted towards future students who are looking for a way to gather as much information about their possible college in as little time as possible.

To be honest, before I went there, I was a little bit afraid. I don’t really have a problem talking to people from my college, not even if I never met them, but it’s a different game if you’re talking to absolute strangers. After all, you have to deal with a myriad of situations and attitudes. Whereas one person addresses you in the most formal way possible, someone else might be talking you down, for no apparent reason. However, to prepare for such situations, we were given the chance to follow a training session which included roleplays where you could practice difficult to handle situations.

After two days of standing there, pitching my college and helping loads of people (all our teams together gathered some 1400 addresses in just 14 hours (two days of seven hours each) - which, as I was told, is quite a lot.

When the first day ended, two other Comp Sci guys (second and third one from the left) and me decided to have a few drinks and get some chow and we all came to the conclusion that it was a blast.

Normally you’d argue that standing behind a small stand is bad for your mood, even boring … but no, it was great. I loved every second of it! Others totally agree.

Whenever I had time, I took a few shots here and there. Way too many, as always, but hey - pictures, often, say a lot more than words. Many of the lovely ladies and funny guys can be seen in the gallery - comments are open, so share your thoughts!

I’d like to end this entry with a quick “thank you” note to all the students that helped in one way or another and kudos to Jack for hooking me up with a spare SD card so I could continue taking pictures.