USC Ch. 5: Pre-Hell Thought Purge
- littlegreensoldier
- Dec 3, 2016
- 2 min read
Glorious 3D Trojan Knight is here! The Trojan crown got simplified to a mohawk but otherwise it's quite a sight, look at him:
My roommate and I enjoyed some crazy good luck -- we knew jack all about 3D printing but still managed to have this come out in one smooth print. I probably have MakePrintable to thank, they're pretty dope! Solid algorithms that pick out and highlight all your model errors, fix them for you and return a sliced-up version of your model. Sick website guys, keep at it.
But even though I've proudly added Trojanbot to my resume, the creeping feeling of inadequacy is still around. I'd like to say I'm on track in chasing my dreams, but whenever I look around it just feels like I should be doing more. Having recently discovered the Pixar Undergraduate Program's existence I've been quite fired up to learn my animation stuff, but then again I think: only 10 people are accepted every year. A whole chunk of these people are probably either veterans who first tinkered on Maya like 8 years ago, or mad scientists who can rapidly pick up new skills in weeks. Am I up to it? Who knows? I'll just try for a shot in the dark...
On another note, I've also been worrying about my career options. Here they are, in order of priority:
- Technical director (TD), animation/game company (In this order: Character TD, Crowds TD, Character Effects TD, General Effects TD. Can't do Lighting because red-green blindness)
- Graphics Software Engineer, animation/game company
- Graphics Researcher, animation/game company
- Graphics Software Engineer, other company
It just seems that every career I've planned for myself to go into has excess supply / is incredibly toxic with bad hours, bad pay and the whole package. Hours of frantic Reddit searching hasn't helped with the pessimism. Welp. And having recently changed my major to USC's prestigious Computer Science - Games, which somehow stupidly excludes Calc III, Statistics and Software Engineering, I'm seriously wondering if this degree is really as good as it's made out to be?? What CS degree doesn't have Intro to Software Engineering? Granted we do have Video Game Programming, Programming Game Engines and Advanced Game Projects, but I'm still not really comfortable with the idea.
Anyway I really shouldn't be boiling my brain over all this when it's finals week. Thought purge off. Time to work with recursion, doubly-linked lists and Taylor Series! Oh boy...
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