Thought Repository

Good Day


Today was the most excellent day and yesterday was great too. Today I received a phone call from someone at Walt Disney Imagineering to set up a phone interview for an internship position. If you know me you know how excited that would make me. It is only the #1 place I'd want to work. And with all that has happened and how competetive it is to begin with the get a job there I'm very happy to even get to interview. This is just a first round, but I'm still very nervous.

I often express my worries about finding an internship position. I really need to find one this summer because I need this experience I haven't had before. Unfortunately I don't feel that I am very good at the whole job search and interview process. Not being able to well answer the basic question, "What do you want to be doing in a few years?" doesn't exactly set me up for success. I know that I'm really good at a lot of things. It isn't that I don't feel qualified to do any sort of job I'd be interested in, it is just that I don't feel that I'm qualified to get the jobs. I don't think I look that good on paper. I haven't had any internships before, I don't have any major accolades, I'm not an expert at any one thing except maybe learning to solve just about any problem put in front of me. A problem solver is what I am, but how do I sell that?

I had another interview with an amazing company yesterday. Yesterday two guys from 4orty 2wo Entertainment came to the ETC. In standard ETC fashion they gave a talk, took a tour of the project demos, and then interview students who signed up for slots. This is a common occurance at the ETC. So common, in fact, that I almost missed it. We get so much email from the faculty about visitors or lectures outside the ETC or news stories that most of the time I just ignore it because I'm too busy to read and care about it all. Last week when this announcement was sent out I probably assumed 42 was another game company and ignored it. Luckily I actually read the reminder on Monday and noticed the name of one of the two visitors, Elan Lee.

If you're not familiar, Elan Lee and Sean Stewart are two people who work at 42 whose names I recognize because of their role designing "The Beast" and ilovebees, two promotional alternate reality games for Steven Spielberg's AI and Halo 2 respectively. I had to beg to get on the interview schedule.

Basically they are an ad agency that specializes in viral, sub-dermal advertising campaigns such as these two well known ones. If you aren't familiar with the alternate reality gaming genre which the Beast basically defined, you should read the link above. Basically, I found out about the Beast late into the game so I wasn't really able to contribute but I did join one of the groups working on it and did follow the progress. I really like the concept of these games that are immersive and integrate with the real world in a way that never admits it is a game. Plus I love puzzles solving as you'd know if you read about puzzlestorm.

In fact, in his talk Elan Lee passed around a little puzzle which was a round metalic object with a silver dollar stuck inside which you needed to get out. I was able to solve it, and the only other person I saw that was able to was Jesse, the game design professor. Later I was lucky enough to interview with him. They both seemed very interested in the demo of the project I'm working on. I feel like the interview could have gone better, but I will wait and see what happens.

The last exciting thing that happened to me today was tonight's episode of "The West Wing". I guess an episode was removed from the lineup so that tonight was the first of the two episodes I saw them filiming when I visited the set of "The West Wing". It was really cool to see on TV scenes that I saw them filming in person and actors wearing costumes that they were wearing when I met them. Besides that it was a really good episode too. Probably the best one I've seen since Aaron Sorkin left the show.

Comments