🚀 go-pugleaf

(reply to a student who is building a special-topics degree in mm) 

I graduated im May with the same kind of major you've described.  It was 
a lot of fun, and the only reason I don't have a steady job yet is that 
I'm trying to stay in the Nebraska/Colorado area.  As far as I know, this 
is the FIRST four-year degree ever awarded in Multimedia Computing.  
Believe me, that looks good on a resume.  I'm working at a video studio 
now, producing 3-d animation.  Eventuall I hope to land a job in true 
multimedia, but all the offers so far involve moving.  I may have to 
move anyway if nothing shows up in my area, but the point is that there 
ARE jobs out there for such a degree.  

I took courses similar to the ones you've described, but I added another 
group:  I'd find a professor with mm equipment, and propose a special-
topics course where I work one-on-one with the prof on some mm application.
This requires a lot of knocking on doors and hearing the word 'no', but I 
learned more from those courses than anything else.  You should also 
consider more film courses, especially film history (to see how others 
developed a new medium) and filmmaking.

PLEASE let me know how it turns out.  I'll help out however I can.  If 
the 'big cheeses' balk at the idea of a multimedia degree, tell them 
the University of Nebraska already approved such a degree, and they have 
even less mm equipment than your college does.

As for the future, I believe that mm, or something equivalent, should 
become a regular degree program.  A good mm director should know about 
computers, video, audio, images, writing, etc. to take full advantage 
of the medium.  I believe that existing mm titles still don't use the 
medium to it's full power, primarily because we're still developing the 
'language' of the medium - like the early film directors.  Multimedia, 
though poorly defined, isn't going to go away, but neither art nor  
comp sci directly address all the issues we need to be aware of.  We 
need a regular degree program.

--William Dye
willdye@helios.unl.edu