CGDC update #1

We've been having some epic techie times here. Wednesday prep for filming at daVinci Days, with top-of-the-line video equipment, today up to CGDC in Portland [Christian Game Developers' Conference]: AWESOME stuff! Tonight the FLL workshop on the other side of Portland, I got ENTHUSED.....tomorrow more CGDC conference, then Saturday and Sunday home to Corvallis for the best science and innovation festival in Oregon: daVinci Days, where I'll be filming with CCAT TV studio all weekend, and Saturday I'll be with Eagle Cybertechnology and Spartan Robotics FIRST robotics teams at the local-team demo. Hope to see y'all there!!

And I am pretty much convinced that DigiPen Institute of Technology is the place for me. There have been some amazing opportunities lining up in the last few weeks: starting out with a new FLL recruit mentioning that his dad is the leader of the CGDC and is heading to the workshop this weekend, then us getting to attend the workshop, then the speaker on 'Women in Game Design', then the awesome contact we made with a graduate from DigiPen whose WIFE is the admissions officer at DigiPen.....

Spent a few hours this evening talking with this DigiPen graduate. He is enthused about the town [safe, a bit outside of Seattle WA], the school [TOP professors, lots of core classes], and the general education [I was worried about game programming being too specialized: it now appears that anyone who graduates from DigiPen will be overqualified to do just about anything else: they 'get lazy' and go to work for Microsoft developing big-name programs and all. In short, four years of pure insanity and then--you're MADE. [Oh and still mad, but that's collateral.]

Not sure at this point which degree to go for. The contact [Joseph Vasquez] is massively enthused [......] that I could become the first woman to get the degree [recently added] in Computer Engineering....still wavering between that and RTIS [more programming-oriented].

We also got the very interesting story behind DigiPen: a Lebanese man got snuck onto a college campus, got caught, said he was there to apply, passed the test and went on to take 19 years of college. DoD work in 3d [hush-hush, blowing things up..] then got ties with Nintendo....DigiPen shares a building with Nintendo....anyways companies were going round to all the big engineering colleges who pooh-poohed their efforts to find game developers. And DigiPen was born.... ;)
First a Lebanese immigrant....Now it might have someone who is failing to get her high school diploma from Lebanon High School, Oregon, in order to complement her insane test scores and mad skillz.....not to pitch myself too high. But I have to sell my skills or no-one will believe I can do anything....

I blame FIRST for all of this, just for the record :)