Sunday 06 September, 2009
Devine after one year
About a year and a half ago, I decided MCT wasn’t my thing, so I dropped out. I figured Devine – the new track my university was about to add to their offering – would be more my cup of tea. About 6 months later I wrote what I was told a few weeks before school started again. Most of you suspected a lot of promo-talk, but no real value. A few of you thought the juice might not be worth the squeeze. And some of you (and me) somehow knew that this would be exactly what I needed.
I could start telling about all the stuff I learned and about the projects I had to make, but why use words, if there’s Vimeo? Here’s a quick showreel about Devine 2008-2009 one of our lecturers (Nicolaas Bijvoet) made.
I’m very pleased about Devine. They didn’t lie at all. They told us we would create. And that’s what we did. We created all kinds of stuff. Robots, product sites, mockups, interactive scrapbooks, hell we created so many things I lost track of what I actually created until I found some stuff back on my server…
And not only did they give us all kinds of assignments, personally a few of them really inspired me. I created and experimented so much in the past few months, and it felt so great!
I am really looking forward to starting again in the second year of Devine, later this month.
Hi,
My name is Pieter and in two years I’m going to university too.
So I’ve been thinking lately about what to choose.
My question is: when you started Devine, did you have any knowledge about xHTML, CSS, PHP, JS, …?
And if so, are the lessons rather boring for the first half year?
Thanks
Pieter
Hi Pieter,
I did have ‘quite some’ knowledge of HTML/CSS/XML/Flash/PHP/etc. However being in for 18 months, I realized I’ve learned SO much new stuff! I found myself exploring new limits every single day.
I won’t lie to you: Devine is hard. It’s lot’s of hard work and it tends to get tiresome (any Deviner will agree).
However if you really like what you do, you should be able to manage yourself and get passed the first 2 years
Having a good background in programming really helped me out, and I could put lots of time of learning into more design-related classes.
If you haven’t got any knowledge regarding programming or video or design, it might become very very hard. The learning curve is really steep.
A few friends of mine managed to pass everything to this point, without any experience when first starting in Devine. So it _is_ possible, but it requires some discipline.
Good luck with choosing. It’s an important one, so do make sure it really is what you want