Recently I started back up in my Bachelors program to finish up my degree. When I first decided to pursue a higher education, I had already been over ten years removed from high school, and mainly did so because I was unemployed at the time and figured that a degree might help in that area. I pushed forward and had my Associates degree in two years, and had started on my bachelors. I was majoring in IT with a focus on web development, and though I am still interested in what makes the Internet and various programs tick, I found that the direction the course was taking was far more technical than I wanted to get. I’m more of a content creator (and probably not a great one at that) than someone who is programming on the back end of websites that you know and love. I enjoy the craft of creating things such as the written word, artwork, or audio and video content, but don’t really want to program the programs used to make them. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does, because I’m not going to reiterate it.
At a certain point I had a bad experience in one of my classes and threw my hands up. I needed a break, and I didn’t care if that meant delaying my degree. What was supposed to be a short break, turned into over a year off. I had been officially dropped from the school roster and had to start the whole process over again. Thankfully, credits don’t just disappear, and I was able to transfer into a different Bachelors program with a major in Business. I figure this is broad enough to enable a multitude of job opportunities, and it just so happens that an industry I love just so happens to be big business.
Yes, as you should all well know by now, I’m talking about the gaming industry, which has been a focus of mine for many years, but only from an outsider hobbyist standpoint. I look in on games I enjoy, make commentary and move on. I might make broader statements about the industry at large, and we talk about more technical and social impacts of the industry on the Couch Podtatoes podcast quite regularly.
Seeing as how the games market is a big group of businesses, it makes sense that I can draw upon source material and then use that to churn out school papers. This week, that’s exactly what I’m doing. There was a writing prompt for a paper in which we have to pick a recent news story where the ethics of a business have been questioned. My first thought was to talk about Smedley and his parting with Daybreak, but then I remembered an even better story, with more ethical issues to analyze: Chris Roberts and Star Citizen vs. Derek Smart.
The main article I’m going to pull from is directly from Derek Smart, but in that lengthy post he references all sorts of other articles where more hard facts can be pulled from. Some of this is definitely speculation, but the ethics of what Roberts Space Industries has done to this point are definitely in question. I love the fact that I can talk about something I love (games) in a school setting and will still be able to get credit for ethics in business. It’s just too perfect, and I’m hoping that this is something that will continuously present itself so I can float through the last year of college with more interest than I might have had for some other course material. Of course, I know that not all classes are going to have as broad of writing prompts, but it’s still nice that I’m going to be able to sometimes pull from the games industry and avoid boring topics that don’t interest me. My grades should be better for it.
Just another daily. This time with Robot, I didn’t take a bit of damage for a long time, then lost it all in 3-2. Good times.
Me Vs. Myself and I 
Nifty! Here’s some encouragement to keep at it!
One tip I’d recommend giving a try is to carve out a bit of time for freewriting on assignment topics that look like they’d bore you to tears. If one attacks it from enough angles, kinda like a conversational blog post, it’s likely you’ll find an angle that actually does interest you.
I vividly remember bitching for several long pages on my total inadequacy to recall some literature readings in sufficient depth to discuss it sufficiently, how impossible it was going to be to tie it to the theme the instructor wanted, how utterly strange the desired format was (an encyclopedia-like article, rather than a standard essay) and how it was barely related to my major anyway (hooray, liberal arts.)
Somehow I managed to narrow down that I hated all the assigned readings, save one – Beowulf. That I barely understood the language/poetry at sufficient depth to discuss it, and indeed, had never finished the book (shh, don’t tell) so covering the entirety of the book was right out… But that I was pretty impressed with the picture of the front page of the original manuscript that I found in an article while desperately researching for -something- to say, and that the history of the manuscript itself was more intriguing and drama-filled (monks, fires and stuff) than the story within the text. Hmm..
That led to a spectacularly well-graded paper where the instructor was floored that a non-literature major student had produced such a thing. 🙂
It’s really about finding the thing that you find interesting and care about, imo. Makes it much easier to convey to others why they should care about it too.
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