[Dr. Luke McMillan, a senior lecturer in game design at Qantm College Brisbane, goes in-depth on undergrad education and explains why seemingly unimportant curricula can be extremely important in hindsight.]
As an undergraduate, I studied music, popular music at that. As a teenager, I had aspired to take my "heavy metal" career seriously and make something of myself in this field. I pursued this goal but ended up in something that I would have never imagined at the time.To me, however, my progression into my current role makes perfect sense, but only in hindsight. Currently I am in charge of the academic operations of a private post-secondary, new media college. Being able to lay down bone crunching riffs helps me out very little in my day to day job these days, however the process of learning how to lay down bone crunching riffs was actually more beneficial to running a private college than I might have originally suspected (Figure 1 - In training to become a career academic). This article is for all those students currently studying those un-glamorous subjects that you think are counter intuitive to your future career as an international rock star...
Figure 1
Introduction
It is a common concern for students studying at a Bachelor level in nearly all creative new media degrees that there simply is "not enough" content related directly to their desired career in the curriculum. Liez (2011) refers to these specific "technical" skills that student's desire as "hard skills;" skills which are largely to do with technical proficiency. For the most part, universities cover these skills well, giving students a broad technical skill base, which can then be honed into specific skills once they enter the work force or undertake graduate study (remember that a Bachelor's course must also offer pathways into post-graduate study).
What universities also do very well, (but often with little appreciation from students -- my past self included) is teach the "soft skills" (ibid) which form the other part of the holistic persona that Liez describes as being most attractive to employers. Soft skills are the attributes of a person in terms of "work ethic, teamwork and personality traits" (ibid). Soft skills can also be extended to cover areas such as communication skills, lateral thinking, problem solving and creativity. The interesting thing about 'soft skills' is often this is what a potential employer will want to see in an applicant first before they even have the chance to present evidence of their hard skills but I'll talk about this later. First, I would like to selfishly reflect on my own naivety.
If you are a student reading this then you may very well be thinking "where are the units in my degree called lateral thinking, problem solving, work ethic etc?" The truth is, these aren't really subject areas, but rather cognitive outcomes that can only be achieved through training -- you don't "strong" so you can be "strong" nor do you run before you can walk and the same applies to any soft skill attribute.
Don't like writing academic essays? Nor do most people. Don't think that you will ever write one again? Most people won't -- but that is not the purpose of these exercises. The italics on "exercise" should give you some indication of where this heading...
Remember those bone crunching riff skills that I was talking about? Sure, it requires technical proficiency to be able to achieve this, but if university had only focused on this specific skill, then you can imagine how other "lesser" musicians would have responded (namely jazz music whingers). Instead, we were given a number of tasks to complete relating to creating drum beats. I can still remember cuing my most potent rage face and thinking "Drum beats! I am not a drummer, what does this have to do with me?" In fact, the same rage was being experienced by all around me -- drummers included.
The task was simple albeit seemingly stupid and unnecessary to me at the time -- write and perform a drum beat using computer software which is in a country and western genre and would have contemporary appeal for that market. It wasn't long before these exercises piled up on top of each other and I eventually failed the unit. I legitimized the failure in my head as being moot -- when would I ever need to write and perform country and western drum beats as a guitarist in a world class metal band?
