Sophomore year, finished!
On Wednesday, I officially finished my second year in college and I’m kind of glad that we finally got some time off. Our learning environment is highly competitive and filled with stress, especially in the final days, hours, minutes of a project. While I don’t have any problem coping with the stress and actually enjoy it, at times, it’s quite nice to not have to get up way too early and not have to prepare something.
The second year provided me with interesting insights, especially in regards of Flash ActionScript (still AS2 though), Processing (a powerful little IDE) as well as interaction design. We’ve conceptualized and built a great many things, some better than others. All in all however, it was a good year, not as great as it could have been, but definitely not sub par. The end of year 2 also marked the time where our groups split up to specialize in one of four areas of expertise:
For all those that are interested in creating the visual part of a CI, love to play with typography and create posters, media design is the way to go.
For those looking to create concepts for great ideas and better understand the psychology behind selling a product to customers, interaction strategy will be the profile of choice.
For those that are training to be interaction designers, with a deep understanding of user interface and user experience design, information and interaction will be the best solution.
And, finally, for the (rather small) group of people that wants to specialize in the development of Rich Internet Applications and web services in general, as well as interactive setups and discovering new trends, creative technology is going to be the name of the game.
Given my interest in technology, I opted for the creative technology set of classes. After talks with people who already work in the very field I plan on working in, I realized that a strong understanding of the technical side, paired with a sense for marketing is the best way to go.
We’ll see how good (or bad) a choice this will turn out to be…
Creative technology - can’t wait to see how that comes out. That’s an excellent idea to sum up where tech is going, the merger between the tech and the content, where you can’t have one without the other.