I have a paper that says so.

27-07-12

It's official, I'm now just a little bit more educated as the average 18 year old American. Apparently the average American has graduated high school and done a little college/university. I've managed to jump both those hurdles at the same time. I've got a diploma from a university.

Today I received my diploma. I've officially been awarded a Higher National Diploma (with distinction) in Computer Games Programming. Aside from one subject I had near perfect marks.

The HND is basically higher education for those who couldn't quite make the mark. It was designed as a gateway to those who either didn't get quite good enough grades to get on a degree course, or those who left it too long and whose grades are no longer valid.

I, and others on the award, often referred to us as the slow group. Many of our subjects were spoon fed to us and, whether they realised it or not, many of the lectures treated us quite differently than they did the degree students. By that I mean, the workload was much lighter, the marking was a bit looser, the assignments were a little bit easier, and we quite literally took the same class three times over, just to make sure it all sunk in I guess. In one to one sessions the tutor would speak to us in a way that you might find you speak to someone who, it's all that stable and may bit you if provoked.

Other teachers however, swung the opposite way, they were aggressively positive about our abilities, or they just liked to make fun of our educational status as often as possible. It wasn't a problem, it was just something I noticed. In one of my first lectures, while we were getting out our safety scissors and circles of paper, the lecturer (whose quite known for this type of comment) stood in front of us and the first thing he said to us was "You're all here on a HND award correct? So it's safe then to say, that you already know something, quite a lot probably, about failure. And hopefully, but not hugely likely, a little something about how to avoid it."Yes he really talks like that. I always imagined that all of his dialogue was written as a narrative by Douglas Adams.

Every so often we'd get a boost of confidence when a degree student would see some of our work and be astonished as the difficulty. I'm still pretty proud that we came out having learned more Java than the degree web developers, and more programming languages that any of the other subjects, but that's more to the award being Games Programming than anything else. It swung the other way when the degree students would look at our math's work, or system development work and say "I can help you with that I did it in 6th Form... (7th-ish grade) for those of you in America.

But still. I can't fault the skills I've come away with. I now know 5 programming languages encompassing both OOP and procedural languages, basic AI techniques, basic physics programming, engine design, game design, systems design and development, and technically academic writing techniques, and have reasonably extensive experience in each.

From here I move on to a condensed final year of the BSc degree course known as a Top-up. From what I can tell it's effectively the last 2 years of the BSc hons award crammed into two semesters with third semester for our project stuck on the end. We're moving from the short bus to the hover bus, it should be fun.

One Step for Student.

I recently attended a program intended to give a taste of what student life will be like to those who might otherwise not know what to expect at my soon to be university. The program is called Step-Ahead.

I attended because I'm aware don't do well in a school environment. I'm lazy, impatient, anti-social and don't respond well to authority of any kind. I figured if I can get through these three days without killing anyone or myself then I have a chance at handling university.

The program is quite simple. You arrive on Monday morning and register. You're given an itinerary, various access codes and keys to a room in the halls of residence. You then spend the next 3 days living on campus with 125 others. We get to know the school, some of the teachers and student ambassadors and most importantly, we get to know other students on similar courses.

The itinerary was very busy and included a range of lectures, team building and various projects all about teaching us how to be effective students. The days were packed, from 8am to 730pm we've got somewhere we need to be. Personally I found the pace a bit too much, once a day they'd give us a 15 minute break, the only problem with this is that at a walking pace the lecture room that we were using was approximately 6 minutes walk each way from any of the break areas.

The evenings tended to revolve around the student union bar, no real surprise there. There were Wii games (Guitar Hero World Tour), a DJ or Karaoke, and cheap drinks. Those of you who know me know that I'm not big on the drinking scene but I'm pleased to announce I went out both nights and made an effort, in participating not so much the drinking. I even took part in one karaoke song after 4 JDs and a Sambuca.

I became reasonably well acquainted with several students while I was there, mostly because they all wanted a chance to talk to the American. I quickly became known as The American or Old Man on account that I've got 10 years on 80% of them. It may interest some people to know that I actively socialized with lots of people and aside from one anti-social break down I managed to keep the attention seeking behavior to a minimum.

The mentors, the group of people (all students themselves) that were leading the program, were clearly getting annoyed with us. We were a pretty raucous group. For example, in the middle of the night one drunken student set of the fire alarm whilst smoking in his room, then proceeded to rip the smoke detector off the wall, apparently there's more to that story but I wasn't told. Several of the students noticed that with each full session the mentors were a little bit angrier and more impatient with us than the previous. At the end of it the guy in charge said "I'd like to say that it's been a pleasure having most of you here." clearly we've not been the best group.

I managed to build somewhat of a reputation with security. I'd been on campus less than 24 hours and managed to accidentally break into 3 restricted areas. It seems that if there's a broken latch or someone forgets to lock a door anywhere on campus I'll find it. Security were clearly getting a little tired of seeing me by 5:30am Tuesday morning, the last conversation went something like, "I should have known it was you Derek. Here I'll show you where the library is, you can go there whenever you like." Sorry Sid, I couldn't sleep and was looking for somewhere outside of my room to be. They really should lock the doors if they don't want people in there.

All in all Step Ahead was a good experience. I think I've got a pretty good taste of how the next 4 years of my life are going to be. I'm actually looking forward to September when I will get to see everyone again.