Developing a New Major

industry wants college graduates that they hire to be credible talented professional, smart people, driven, result oriented, experience with teamwork, passionate about games, customer focused want to learn, have the skills they need not expecting specific tech skills or industry experience for some of their entry level jobs

game design undergrad alone may not be enough – may need to do mastrs level work to get extra programming experience

lots of women want to work at EA on the sims project and now on Spore

things people need to know

• how to work in teams bigger than 2 people (some programming teams are 100+ people)
• how to collaborate with non-tech people
• communication skills
• project management skills
• be able to adopt and deal with ambiguity (one prof changes some aspect of hte project a couple of weeks before hte due date to simulate industry kinds of last minute parameter changes – they shuffle groups or increase the number of required levels, add some feature they have to have)
• be able to give and receive feedback be comfortable sharing work, be able to accept complements and criticism gracefully, be able to incorporate criticism and praise in future projects (don’t make the same mistakes twice)
• self-reflection
• liberal arts and humanities classes spark your creativity
• do research projec ts that hsow your interest, your problem solving skills
• get some experience with large code bases (some games are 5-6 million lines of code!)
• know how to debug and refine

things to do outside of class

• make games entire games from start to finish, mods – - this helps you stand out at interviews, shows you can stick with a project adn stay focused, shows you can deal with timelines & assets & deadlines, playtest your game, 90% ofwork comes in the last 10% of project, distribute your games, put into contests, put up on the web and encourage people to play and comment
• play with technology on your own
• be passionate about something and learn how to do it
• internships
• enter your games in competition
• do projects on the side outside of class
• take leadership roles – in game projects, in clubs – need the experience

scary facts

70% of new hires at EA are software engineers – hard core programmers

EA outsources a lot of art creation internationally

Interesting people

Colleen McCreary – education connection at EA, previously tech recruiter at microsoft – colleen @eacom, jobsea.com/students, she has done teleconferences with game classes

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