I don’t want to take too much time to talk about this right now, but over the past year I’ve seen a lot of attrition occur within our faculty. Somewhere around 80-90% of the faculty that were present on my first day a year and a half ago are no longer at the school anymore, and not all of it was voluntary. This really sucks for someone in my position who has to keep rebuilding relationships with new staff everytime we go through a change of personnel. It’s like growing a tomato plant, and just before you’re able to harvest those delicious tomatoes, an animal comes and rips up the entire plant and eats the tomato. Despite the really dumb analogy, that’s pretty much how it feels.
The reason I’m bringing this all up is because my adviser and main teacher during this final year of school is no longer there. I spent a good portion of Friday last week talking to him, and now I find out this morning he’s gone, just a few days later. This is the second time it’s happened to me when I got close to a teacher, and it’s extremely frustrating.
Clearly this kind of thing happens in the industry all the time; people come and go in positions all the time, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. The difference here I guess is that these people are highly influential in my ability to get jobs coming out of this school. Not having them there to recommend my work and everything is pretty debilitating. This also means that everything that he was overseeing in terms of my education, including things that he was tailoring for me, are now out the window. I hate for this to sound like a bitch-fest, but I just need to let out my…disappointment(?) with things. I’m not really sure if that’s the word I want to use here.
In other news, in addition to somehow maintaining my 4.0 all the way into my final semester, I also am now Student Government president. That kid of role comes with a completely different set of issues that I have to deal with. It also means I’m basically managing two different teams of people, my game studio group and now the representatives. This whole situation is giving me an opportunity to expand my ability set by forcing me to step back and rely on lieutenants to get 90% of the things I need done. So that’s the good in all of this. I’m just going to be extremely busy managing people over the next few months, and hopefully will have the time to get all my applications sent out.