Finding Momentum

This semes­ter I’ve been slowly (and qui­etly) piec­ing together a list of options that I’m con­sid­er­ing for my near future. I real­ize that telling peo­ple that “I’m pray­ing about it” might be true, but I need to be tak­ing some prac­ti­cal steps to nar­row my focus.

Grad School: Okay, so my par­ents are push­ing me down this path, but I’d say as of now the like­li­hood of it is pretty small (sub­ject to rapid change).
1. CS: I don’t know, doing some­thing hard­core, or at least just hard.
2. Infor­ma­tion: Actu­ally, (the idea of) this kind of excites me (see: Berkeley’s iSchool). Man­ag­ing, visu­al­iz­ing, index­ing, har­ness­ing infor­ma­tion in the con­nected world.
3. HCI: focus­ing on user-centered com­put­ing. Okay, so CS160, although I com­plained about it a lot, was actu­ally enjoy­able. And super excit­ing because it cross-pollinated with my soci­ol­ogy research meth­ods course. I don’t think I’d mind doing some high-level research, much like how a friend of mine is research­ing with the Berke­ley Insti­tute of Design doing human-centered com­put­ing.
4. Art school: okay, this has actu­ally war­ranted noth­ing but a pass­ing thought (side note: in HS I actu­ally some­what con­sid­ered apply­ing to an art school).

Job Options: This may be more likely to hap­pen in the near future.
1. HCI/UI/UX: in the soft­ware indus­try, user inter­face design and imple­men­ta­tion actu­ally accounts for about 50%, if not more, of the total work put into a prod­uct. Inter­face engi­neers are becom­ing more and more impor­tant as appli­ca­tions become more preva­lent in the 21st cen­tury.
2. Soft­ware engi­neer­ing: Code mon­key. The scale of this field is ginor­mous, from end-user appli­ca­tions to huge enter­prise apps.
3. Web design/development/engineering: FAQQLY was my first seri­ous foray into the web development/engineering world. I love it. I seri­ously do. All “Web 2.0″ buzz­words aside, things that excite me about web­dev are the emer­gence of ser­vices and the rel­a­tively undis­cov­ered social appli­ca­tions of the Net.
4. Graphic/New Media designer: Work­ing with art, design, illus­tra­tion,
type, pho­tog­ra­phy, motion, poten­tially 3D. Less code, more pretty. I actu­ally wanted to do this right out of HS, but these days I’m see­ing it more of a hobby. Hope­fully over win­ter break I can get some new stuff done here.
5. Adver­tis­ing agency: haha putting this out there for fun, but what if the mass comm major actu­ally counted for something?

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I’m done cod­ing for the semes­ter. Final count: 170+ hours on 162 project, ~70 hours on 160 project. My poor eyeballs.