Hello! Burin

These past few months I’ve been looking into Human-Computer Interaction graduate programs. Despite the small size of the field, it’s been difficult narrowing down my choice of programs. I’ve been able to do it though!

• Carnegie Mellon - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Georgia Tech - Atlanta, Georgia
• Uppsala Universitet - Uppsala, Sweden

Now there’s always the question of whether I should or shouldn’t go, since going to school full-time at that level won’t allow me to work as much (meaning less monies). There’s also the fact that I could just work and go on with my life with only a bachelors. The demand for web developers is there, based on the number of calls I’m getting (especially in the Ruby on Rails arena), but I’m really interested in moving back towards design and focusing on creating usable systems.

The good news is that whatever decision I make, I’ll have a year to decide what I want to do! If I do decide to go, I’ll start my Masters in HCI in Fall 2009. If I don’t, then I’ll just be livin it up, working in a field where I’m doing what I love doing. Either way, I think I’d be pretty happy!

Last week I attended Design Thinking Dallas at IMC². Overall, the event was pretty good. We had lunch, beer, and other free stuff. I think the tour was the best part of the event haha (thanks Mr. Capone!).

In my last post, I mentioned how some advertising agencies and marketing firms were slow to realize the potential of interactive media in their industry. Now I know who’s benefiting from that. IMC² really hit a niche, and they’re exploding by doing everything right.

The culture there is just amazing. Scooters in the halls, employees bringing their pets in to work with them, chairs & tables on the ceiling (upside-down room), and $1 “root” beer fridges goes to show how employee oriented the place is. I even saw a family-of-four in playing Nintendo Wii together there. They also have a culture club where people sign up for events and activities, like rock-climbing and biking, to promote life outside of the workplace.

Amazingly enough, they actually get stuff done.

Over the past couple of months or so, ALTA (Ad League at Texas Arlington) has been touring some ad agencies and not-so-ad agencies. Today we toured The Richards Group! The experience has been pretty enlightening.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that to these agencies, “the internet” is this magical medium that is exploding and bursting at the seams. Like, wow, it’s so awesome, it brings us all together like a nice bowl of chili. Ripe for the freaking picking. But only the people in the Dungeon of Doom (IT dept anyone?) manage anything to do with it. What?

Whether the companies outsource it to a web-dev shop or send it to their “interactive” department, the development and publication of a website seems to be totally separate from the rest of the “campaign”. Yey for the red headed step-child of advertising :(

Come on guys! Web developers aren’t that scary. We can join the team! Not all of us speak English as a second language, or third, or fourth (after xhtml, css, javascript, and the like, of course!) like the other mysterious programmers.

I say we mingle. Mmm. Mingle.

P.S. Thanks Amanda and David!

I am in a position that most college students would be envious of: after just 2 years in school I have graduated with a bachelor’s in business administration. For those of you interested in how I managed this amazing feat here are my six easy steps to getting the bare minimum out of school.

1. If you know a foreign language, major in it.

The key to any short lived college experience is testing out of as many classes as you can. At my particular school you can easily knock out four foreign language courses by taking just one credit by exam. This means a single 2 hour test saves you about 4 semesters of foreign language. It also assures that you won’t learn a thing in school related to your major, but that’s okay because remember: you’re not there to learn, you’re there to get that hallowed piece of paper in as little time as possible.

2. If you have a job, quit now.

There’s no greater time waster than some minimum wage job you’re working to try to pay through school. That’s 30-40 hours a week that would be better spent taking the maximum allowed amount of hours at your school. Of course when you graduate and you’re writing your all important resumé you will have nothing to put under “experience” but don’t worry about that because you’ll have “bachelor’s” under education and employers love college graduates with no real world experience, especially those that graduate in just two years. Trust me, I know.

3. If you don’t know a foreign language, major in something you hate.

If you are going into college with an insane amount of credits like I did make sure to pick the major that maximizes the utilization of those credits. Who cares if you’ve had a lifelong passion to be an anesthesiologist, you’re trying to graduate in two years, so if 90% of your credits are good towards that bachelor’s in kinesiology degree and only 80% are good towards that pre-med degree, the choice is obvious. Kinesiologists and anesthesiologists are the same thing anyway, just a few letters at the beginning and thousands of dollars in earning power difference really.

4. Do not study abroad, the continental U.S. is your friend.

A sure fire way to spend more time in school than necessary is to study abroad for a semester. Most study abroad programs I have seen only offer a few credits of work over the semester. This means you won’t be taking the maximum amount of hours every semester. Far more dangerous though is that you might like it so much you decide to stay another semester or god forbid you find the inner you, rethink your life and decide that maybe you should switch majors to something you really love. Avoid this at all costs.

5. Forget about the Ivy league, the grass is greener in your state.

I’m sure there are some cases out there of super smart genius kids getting out of Harvard or Yale in two years or less, but for most of us that just isn’t going to happen. Not only because we’re not all super smart genius kids, but these schools won’t take most of those all-important high school credits, unless you absolutely ace all of the exams, in which case that would make you a super smart genius kid, and well I already covered that. Plus if you’re going to a school like that you’ll probably want to stay the full four years because you’ll love it so much. Once again, that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid, so shoot for your local state college instead. They’ll give you credit for those advanced placement exams even if you barely sneaked by with a passing grade and really don’t know a single thing about the subject. In this way public institutions are superior to those private schools, because they know college is not a quest for knowledge but rather a quest to a framed diploma on your wall stating proudly “Bachelor’s of Science in Communications.”

6. Learning takes time, so don’t do it

The golden rule to graduating in two years is to avoid learning like the plague. Learning is like a bad case of lyme disease, no one really knows what it is, but they do know you should avoid it. The more you learn the more likely you’ll stay in school, then you might accomplish things and be rewarded for things and well, it hurts just to think about it. So make sure you don’t learn, it’s completely unnecessary especially since you’ll learn everything you need to know on the job, that same awesome job you’ll get because you got that bachelor’s in just 2 years…

Wikipedia says:

A pea is the small, edible round green bean which grows in a pod on the leguminous vine Pisum sativum, or in some cases to the immature pods. This legume is cooked as a vegetable in many cultures.

I say:

They’re damn tasty. Actually, not really. But I do like them with a good, southern, home-cooked meal. Like at IHOP.

But I’ve never eaten peas that weren’t frozen before they were cooked. Have you? I wonder what they taste like…

We’re have our new host now, DreamHost, with loads and loads of space and loads and loads of bandwidth. Anyways, the current plan is to just get stuff up and out there. This will be our blog for daily musings and rants.

http://railing.dreamhosters.com will be the sandbox for Rails that we’re going to play with. I have no idea what we’ll be doing, but maybe the linkbox project will come to fruition sooner than never.