Sharan Volin

Well, the last few months have been pretty bad (it seems to be going around lately) and today was a serious day from hell. I was upset about some problems with a friend of mine, got 3 hours of sleep last night, had an interview with someone for the Computer Science Honor Society but never managed to meet up with him, and then got a parking ticket because I forgot to put the temporary parking permit back up this morning. And then came the final top for the day...

I'm being let go from my job. The 31st is my last day. It's partially they don't have another project to put me on and partially just the class situation has been a lot more difficult than I expected and I really haven't been able to manage 40 hours a week. It's not completely unexpected because I could tell they were getting frustrated with me. They're still really happy with me and will give me a great recommendation and are willing to use me on contract jobs, but they're too small a company to really keep me on full time, and now I need to find other work. And now I know I really CAN'T in good faith even consider any full time jobs because I know I can't do it. In fact I found out a core requirement I was hoping to get appealed was denied so now I have to take 10 credits in the fall if I want to graduate in May, which is definitely not conducive to a full time job.

Ironically enough this was probably the least stressful thing to go wrong today, I guess because it does help my stress level, since my classes this semester have not been going well and I can really use the extra time to focus on them.

So now I'm looking again, so if anyone knows of any part time contract work in the Los Angeles area let me know. And now I do have 3 1/2 months of heavy Actionscript 3 game programming experience, with a really impressive game to add to my portfolio that I'll be finishing up this week and that hopefully will be live not much after that so I can finally show it off!

I won't go into the other nasty stuff going on right now, but next week I'll probably post about the car accident nightmare of the past month and a half (I'm going to wait until AFTER my small claims court date just to be safe).

Wow. I just finished my first short story in about 10 years. Yeah, it's a first draft and probably could use some more work. And it's silly, has a kind of a short shelf life because it deals with some current issues, and I have no idea what market would be good for it (it's near future but otherwise not really SF). But it's a complete story, so I'm happy:). It's due tomorrow in class.

They still haven't posted official grades yet by my Calculus 3 teacher said he already knows I got at least a D. All I need is a D- to not have to retake it. *WHEW!* My GPA is definitely going to drop this semester but I'll just have to make sure I bring it back up in the future.

I also may be looking at a slight shift in majors:

http://gamepipe.usc.edu/Bachelors.html

It's not approved yet but they're hoping to have it available in the fall. I'll still be here and everything I'm taking next semester applies to both majors anyway. And it's STILL a Computer Science degree. And it means no foreign language requirement (Yay! No Spanish 3 after all!), less math required (I'd be done with math after Linear Algebra next semester instead of still needing Probability), and a few other classes I need now won't be required anymore, and they'd be replaced by a bunch of game classes (several of which I've already taken for my minor). I think this could work out really well!

I suspect I'll probably go for the masters too when I'm done (assuming I can afford it at that point):

http://gamepipe.usc.edu/Masters.html