Week Nineteen - Any Monkey Could Teach Them Selves

Okay firstly is that going to university should not be about just learning new ‘skills’ so you can perform a new task, any monkey could essentially do that. Throughout uni you should change as person (for the better hopefully) and have a new perspective, one of the things I remember Mike saying in the first week is “if you go to university and come out the end unchanged, to me that’s a waste of time”. So the course your on should not be just churning out tools for trades, of which I believe our course is very far from it.

As I’ve come to realise education is pretty messed up, maybe this is just an idea that’s been implanted in my head by Mike and Chris, as they spend half their time telling us this, but I do think they tell the truth. At GCSE’s and A-Levels, once I had figured out okay to get the grade all I need to do is check these boxes and I’m done. But what a really bad way to do something, by doing this you learn almost nothing. Since coming to uni I’ve tried to stop doing work just for the sake of doing work, and once you realise this you start actually wanting to do the work, getting more out of it, and more often than not produce something better. On this course just in the first year I’ve learnt stack loads, both just skills and technical stuff, but also more importantly I think I’ve learnt how to learn and approach problems.

So anyway back on track, this should be the reason that game companies (or any business for that matter) want uni grad’s, because as well as having the knowledge and skills to make work, they should also have the mind set and understanding to be able to work in the environment, and analyse problems better. Kind of hard to explain this, basically uni should give experiences and brain power to apply you skills to make awesome work, something I fear a lot of course really do not do. As has been said before, any monkey could teach them selves 3DS Max, but unless firstly they have those fundamental drawing skills, being able to see properly and actually recreate from 3d, to 2d, back into 3d, unless you have that know how and understanding, then that, as I said before, would be a waste of your uni life. (by this I don’t just mean the drawing skills as well, I mean all the way of thinking brain capacity stuff).

Right so kind of all messed up there, it makes sense in my head, I don’t think I’ve really explained what I wanted very well, couldn’t think of the right words, I might try and make it more coherent in one of the later tasks, but for now that’s what your getting. And I’ve just gone back and read the task title ‘Life Changing’. So basically that’s it, uni shouldn’t just teach you tools, it should be life changing, done and done.