Before I Forget..

I should do this blog right now before I get lumbered with another job or before I get carried away with Street Fighter IV. I've been meaning to post a blog ever since the month started and make a few more adjustments to my site although work has been taking up my time and keeping me busy, and by the time I get home all I want to do is just rest!

I've been learning more about Google Analytics (well more like what some of their terminology means like Bounce Rate and %Exit) I haven't had much time to work on my website. I really need to think of a way to have returning visitors, my first idea was a blog to let students and placement students alike know what a placement student like me does, learns and gets up to.

With work I've been working with ASP.net and CSS, I know for all you pro's out there this is nothing difficult, but for a total newbie and hard to sink-things-in type learner, it's keeping me on my toes. I've learnt about data-strings and data sources, so this is giving me a good insight into how Visual Studio works and what it does. I must say however, that I really enjoy this type of web-development. What I mean by this is the coding, the testing and the satisfaction of what you accomplish at the finish line. Be it javascript validation or classic asp form or creating an email form these are just a few things to draw from my experience with web development so far. I'm sure there are a lot more things that web development has to offer as well, so whether I come across it now during my work experience, uni, or when I'm working on random things for my own purpose. I look forward to learning more about development.

My placement is almost over, and I really want to start blogging as much as possible now so that I have something to look back on besides my notepad that keeps track of my daily jottings of things to do and other notes. Before I started my placement I really had no clue what I wanted to do with myself in the future, no sense of direction in terms of career plan and or how to achieve it. I had a few pre-concepts of what my calling was such as beat making/ sampling, post-editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and wanting to learn more about Adobe After Effects. I always knew that I had a thing for web-design and developing it, and so with my placement year, I was very fortunate to find a job that contributes to my web-interests and has nonetheless increased my desire to become a web-designer/ developer.

I cannot stress enough about how valuable I have found my work placement to be, which is why I've chosen to dedicate my third year final project to this iteration. It will be a short commercial that will be storyboarded, edited and filmed by myself (although I do have plans to have a few hands to help from a few talented minds of mine).

Once my placement is over and I get university out of the way, I have plans to do a masters. I don't really know what kind of masters yet, so I guess I'll have some homework to do when that time comes. I was thinking something more to do with web design/ development and delve deeper into this world and finding out more about what endless things are possible. Another course would be Visual Communications, for me I think this would be a very good way for me to achieve/ communicate better with the world through images, text and layout of a website. This would help me gain a better scope with what I want to achieve and how to go about it.

If you are a placement student, I would love to hear from you and how your experience is so far. If you were a placement student and have (or haven't yet) graduated from uni, I would like to hear from you and tell me how it has affected you, your work and your employment credibility.

I better stop now before I start babbling.

All the best,
Ren