So in my first month of classes at Full Sail, I took two generic classes that a lot of degrees (if not all) had to take: Psychology of Play and Creative Presentation.

Psychology of Play is like a Psychology class except it focused on a small area of psychology: the area dealing with how fun impacts a person. In it, we learned how usually businesses don’t want their employees to have any fun; instead, they want their employees to go to work to do work. (Weird right?) But we learned that by stripping their workers of having fun, they are not doing the best work they possibly could be doing.

We then looked at companies that did incorporate fun into the work environment, and how these companies make some of the best products: companies like Riot Games and Pixar. And how other companies are noticing this and are trying to mimic their success.

This class was actually pretty cool because if I ever form a company, I know that having a fun working environment will not only cause me to have a good time, but it will also help my company to make a better product. Win-win situations are just so dandy!!

Then there’s Creative Presentation (CRP). CRP is like a Speech class, but the speeches are supposed to not be boring. So to do this, your speeches have to have a powerpoint. Pretty self explanatory class that I enjoyed because it gave me another chance to practice my public speaking, which is something that I want to be good at.

I guess an interesting thing about CRP is that for our only speech in the class we had to act as if we were selling ourselves to a potential employer or to a group of people we wanted to join our company. I went with the latter because I hope of one day forming my one game company.

I ended up basing my presentation on the premise that I was telling a group of people that after I have graduated from Full Sail that I would go get a job at some big AAA company for a few years. But after I had a decent amount of experience, I would blow my conch, thus, signalling everyone to unite for my dream company.

This speech was 13 months ago, yet this is still the plan I have. After spending time in the industry, I’ll be able to find a group of really talented people that I can call on to join my company.

But academics aside, how was the experience of Full Sail during this first month? It was interesting to get a vibe for what the climate is like at Full Sail. I got to see two teachers who were pretty chill, funny, and laid back (this is how most of the teachers at Full Sail are), and I got a look at some of the people in my degree, which is probably one of the biggest degrees at Full Sail.

I’ll be honest: I might’ve been sizing some of my peers up. I was curious how much coding experience some of the game dev students had and how well they did on the math test. I hope I didn’t come across as a douchebag (I’m pretty sure I did it in a non-douchebagy way); I just did it because I wanted to see how I compared in smarts to my peers. It seemed like I had a decent leg up on most of them with having a year of C++ classes as most of everyone I talked to just had HTML experience. That definitely helped inflate my ego.

Besides sizing up my peers, I also managed to make a friend in the class. It’s interesting because she was in the Recording Arts (or maybe it was Sound Engineering) degree at first, but by the time she was done with the month, she had switched to the Creative Writing degree. The “networker” in me was disappointed because I definitely could’ve used a person in the sound industry (there are lots of game designers and developers but not a lot of sound people in the industry). But the friend in me was happy because she decided to do something that her heart really wanted to do.

Anyways, you see that word that I quoted? Yes, that is a word that Full Sail loves to pleasure itself too. And, yes, they want you to get in on the action too (even if that means that you’re just touching yourself in the corner while watching). So instead of going directly onto month 2 of my game development degree, I’d like to give you my thoughts on “networking”.