How good is a Bachelor degree?

[Halowood]

I have no idea what the different everything's mean after high school.

So how good is a bachelor?


I should probably mention it's a Bachelor for Interactive Entertainment with a Major in Games Programming.

[BeamishBoy]

A Bachelor's degree is a basic degree that you would earn from, say, a four year college. While it's at a lower level than a Master's degree or a Doctoral degree, a Bachelor's is often enough for someone to get a decent job in a field. A major in Games Programming means that, within the Interactive Entertainment degree, they probably took courses more focused towards games.

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I hope it helped.

BeamishBoy

[supermoose]

A Bachelors degree is what is required for most entry level technical positions.  It opens a lot of jobs for you, even beyond just games programming though.  Many jobs require a degree of any sort.  These can be helpdesk, QA, administration, or other types of jobs.  Many just require a bachelors degree.

I say plan for a Master's degree, but reassess the situation when you get your bachelor's.  I personally stopped (for now) after getting my bachelors in Computer science because the masters program was unrelated to my interests.  The research opportunities available mostly had to do with computational CSCI, while I was more interested in the application development side.

Also, for the love of god, if you have not tried programming before, buy a "how to" book and force yourself through it.  You will probably learn C or Java in school, which is a good starting point.  I changed majors from physics to Comp Sci with no programming experience, and it was a rude awakening when they expected me to know about compilers and such.

[Halowood]

I've already done some python and we're learning Visual Basic now, with C++ either later this year or next year.
I want to go into game programming (hence the course selection) but one thing I noticed is most of the bigger game developers looking for programmers just require people with extensive knowledge of a certain aspect of game programming and 3+ years of professional work. If I were to get a bachelor and get some smaller end game programming jobs for a few years do you think I'd be able to get one of these jobs?

[Sigfried]

gods damnit, i love the american college system!!!, ours suck ass, can you believe i get my degree in 6 years...of psychology!!!??

[supermoose]

I actually just broke into the games industry myself, getting an offer from Riot Games to help make League of Legends.  From my experience (like 30 failed applications before this one) you need two things to get a real fighting chance. 

First of all, make a portfolio with simple games in it.  Even if they are simple games that have almost no point, proving to the companies that you can finish a project is *extremely* important.  Remake tetris, make your own version of pac man where you are a ghost trying to run from released pac men.  They dont have to be big, but they have to be polished.  I keep www.moosetacular.com running as a base install of wordpress, just so i can upload all my games there, and link employers to my site.

Secondly, find a way to be noticed.  If you send a resume in to the company via email and just hope, you will get thrown into the pile with everyone else.  The way I actually got noticed at Riot was by talking shop with some Riot devs over at the something awful forums.  I gave them my example work, and asked them to push my resume through their HR department.  It worked extremely well.  So, if you know a forum your target employer frequents, if you can arrange to play a game with them, if you can meet them at a convention and invite them up to your hotel to party, anything you can do to get an informal interview before you send them your actual resume will help you bigtime.

[Anghenfil]

supermoose's post is the right idea, I'll build on it a little.

Do you know what you want to do in the game industry?  If you're not sure, then I think an "Interactive Entertainment" degree might be a good fit for you.  You're likely to get exposed to a lot of the different assets related to making games and help you decide where to specialize (if at all).

However, if you know which area of game design you want to go into, I'd think very carefully about going through with it.  It has been my understanding that game degrees tend to prey upon people that have genuine enthusiasm for the medium, taking their money and not giving them the adequate skills to excel in their field.  Make sure the school you're looking at is good.  Which one are you looking at, btw?

But brass tacks here:  What do you want to do in gaming?  If you want to program or rig characters, get a Computer Science or a Software Engineering degree (if you're very brilliant or crazy, maybe some Mathematics).  If you want to texture or do concept art, go for Fine Arts.  Animation, get an animation degree (At a good school - there's a lot of bad ones).  Whichever you pick, do it at a school with a strong ancillary games program/club/class roster, has notable alumni, and their students win awards for game design.  More importantly, make sure YOU are pleased with the work that comes out of the school.

And yes, network.  Network like crazy.  Go to game conventions and meet people, invite them to play games you've made, and make friends.  The more people you know at a company, the better your chances at getting hired.

[Halowood]

What I want to do programming on the game engine side. Haven't written any games yet, however apparently http://www.gametraining.net/ is doing some 2 hour thing at my school during an exam day I have off.
I have no idea what they're actually doing there but I will be there.

The college was one called qantm college @ http://www.qantm.com.au

[Pieter]

Try programming some simple 2D games first.
Don't expect you're going to write networking code or advanced collision detection systems any time soon.

If you want to succeed in college you need to have a passion for creating these internal systems, not just playing them.
And it's not like highschool where you simply need to do your homework to pass.
You need to do work that shows you can problem solve and be creative at the same time.
They'll expect you to go beyond their simple instructions and make something your own.

Just saying.

I know a 13 year old who built a working Quake3 level renderer from scratch.
There's a bunch of those kind of people, and if they do it, so can you, if you're persistent.
But that also means those people will be the ones you'll be competing with on the job market.

However, it's al about your drive to improve yourself, to be self critical and to be thinking outside of the box.
Having a steady evolution is more important then where your skillset is right now.

What supermoose said about FINISHING stuff is extremely important aswel

If you want to be a game programmer, or for that matter, any sort of programmer at all, here's the secret to success in just two words: Ship it. Finish the product and get it out the door, and you'll be a hero. It sounds simple, but it's a surprisingly rare skill, and one that's highly prized by software companies. Here's why.

My friend David Stafford, cofounder of the game company Cinematronics, says that shipping software is an unnatural act, and he's right. Most of the fun stuff in a software project happens early on, when anything's possible and there's a ton of new code to write. By the end of a project, the design is carved in stone, and most of the work involves fixing bugs, or trying to figure out how to shoehorn in yet another feature that wasn't planned in the original design. All that is a lot less fun than starting a project, and often very hard work—but it has to be done before the project can ship. As a former manager of mine liked to say, "After you finish the first 90 percent of a project, you have to finish the other 90 percent." It's that second 90 percent that's the key to success.

- Michael Abrash

About specialization: it's true that most developers search for people that are the very best at a given problem,
rather then bieng 'merely' good at everything.
However, if you're just starting out I'd focus on being a good all-around coder.
Firstly, you'll have some time to find out what kinds of stuff you enjoy doing most,
and secondly it's always good to have surplus skills down the road.

[Anghenfil]

I dunno about that Qantm College you linked.  It's got more red flags than a matador convention:

-I was on their website for a good while and I couldn't find any mention of what their faculty had accomplished, or even who they were.  No bios, no links to work they'd done.  I had to go to a review of the college to find names at all.

-I went to their Alumni site and looked at their student show reel.  It was okay I guess - I'd say maybe half of it was hirable material.  Some of it was genuinely good.  But I would expect EVERYTHING on a good show reel to be hirable.  A lot of it was downright awful - unmodified ocean and noise shaders, crappy weightless animation, unremarkable designs and content.   And there was this profoundly annoying "flashing" effect through the whole video.  Couldn't find any games that students had made or games that alumni had gone on to work in.  Here's the student reel.

-I found a magazine review of Qantm in Edge, let me quote you an excerpt:

When organising graduate positions, we have a number of areas that allow for that. We have a global HR portal/social site called mySAE.org, which is there for students, graduates and alumni. Similar to Facebook, maybe, but more of a work networking thing. So we have major companies coming to us advertising exclusively on there, avoiding recruitment agencies.

When it comes down to full-time jobs, our lecturers do help place them but it’s as much, if not more, down to the student. Any college or university that says otherwise is mis-selling themselves. If we were to go to a studio and say: “We’ve got this student that’s interested in this position,” 90 per cent of the time they’d tell them to get off their arse and express that interest themselves. Sure, we can reiterate their skills and everything, but if they don’t have the energy or drive to apply they probably don’t have it for working in that area.

No mention of studios visiting the school for recruiting, or even which major companies advertise exclusively with them, is VERY BAD.  In pretty much every field I can think of, schools try to cultivate close working relationships with companies so that their students have a foot in at least one door when they graduate.  Also, word-of-mouth from lecturers is a major way that students get hired - if the lecturers are respected in their field and have good networking, I would certainly expect that their recommendations are taken seriously.  Of course that motivation needs to ultimately come from the student, but the way he's phrasing this whole thing makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  It almost reads like "You're on your own to get yourself a job."

In closing, tread carefully.  I could be wrong and it's actually an amazing school, but this looks a lot like the diploma mills we have in America for games.  Really glitzy web design and a lot of smooth talk, but no real education that would get you into the field.  Definitely talk to a few alumni in your chosen speciality before taking the plunge - Ask if they could do it all over again, would they go somewhere else.  Ask if they're happy where they are now.  If you know that you're interested in game programming, consider a straight-out Computer Science degree at a renown school.  They almost always have course modules focused in games anyway, because it's such a hot field.

[Pieter]

When you're having an interview for applying at any school. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Ask a lot of questions.
Prepare a list of things you want to ask.
And certainly ask the questions you think might make them uncomfortable, or you might even consider impolite -- though you should always stay polite.

If they're a quality school they should have no problem answering your questions.
If you notice their answers go into an evasive PR-talk fashion, then forget it.
You might need to qualify to get in, but you're paying their rent also, so you better expect something in return.

So don't be afraid to ask them any kind of questions, just stay confident and friendly. It's a benefit to both parties.

[Calco]

As a former student of 3D in Australia Halowood, I can tell that I've only heard bad things about QANTM, and I met a lot of students had transfered from them to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. So if you are looking for training AIE is the place, especially if you're in the Sydney area, they have a lot of industry speakers and ex-industry teachers. Or you can try actual Universities.

[Halowood]

As a former student of 3D in Australia Halowood, I can tell that I've only heard bad things about QANTM, and I met a lot of students had transfered from them to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. So if you are looking for training AIE is the place, especially if you're in the Sydney area, they have a lot of industry speakers and ex-industry teachers. Or you can try actual Universities.

Sold.