I’ve been working in the background a reasonable amount on a revamped IGDA Students SIG, which is still a work in progress, and still needs all kind of help to get going (waiting on the new site to get functionally started too doesn’t help matters).
The SIG, even though I am not a student right now, I just hope to get going. There’s been pretty much no student initiatives in the IGDA, the Education SIG is very centred on the educators, not educatees, and so it’s left to revamp the current Student Action SIG. Not much action, so I certainly think Students SIG is enough, for starters.
I’ve yet to contact the old staff from the SIG, but have been trying to contact students of various sorts, mainly through the forums and (nearly dead) mailing list. You will entirely believe how hard it is to find people to contact who haven’t got email addresses available: it’s Very Hard. What came out of this was the proposal – a draft right now, and needing working, I think, mainly on what should happen in the future, as well as organisational details.
Why is this important anyway? Well, even though I’ve barely taken advantage of it, the British Computing Society has an active Students section, and the IEEE has it’s own version. These have different activities, club parts, and so forth. I’m going to be contacting both to get some knowledge of how they operate, and will try at some point to contact our new Executive Director to get their knowledge on the subject.
It might only start as a web-based organisational effort, and not much more, but hopefully if people are willing to help – and unlike the Preservation SIG, I hope not to do all the work myself (since it’s really hard to find non-busy people interested in that niche, I can tell you!), meaning once it’s going it can run under it’s own steam and not peter out like the last attempt, valiant how that appeared at first to be. The new site should, I hope, be the easiest possible way to start it going, we’ll see soon I guess.
Email me now, leave a comment, or catch me at Develop if you will be there, since I’d love to discuss this in person with someone, and I’ll be bringing it up at every opportunity with any students I do meet 🙂
Andrew, good news!
IGDA Women in Games is currently driving and managing GameMentorOnline, an easy-to-use mentor matching program that, at present, is focused on connecting students with experienced game industry professionals as mentors.
In time (ideally next year), the online program will also alow working professionals to participate as proteges, along with students.
You can learn more at http://www.gamementoronline.org (which takes you to our IGDA web pages, for the time being).
Please let me know how you think the IGDA Student SIG can possibly take advantage of and promote this program. We’d welcome your involvement!
Kind regards,
Fiona Cherbak
Chair, IGDA Women in Games
Ofc: 512/916-9633
Mentors are something some students did put forwards (myself, I like to ask around questions randomly, but I got a mentor doing the IGDA scholarship 🙂 ). This is something, well, we’d want to highly promote – I hope it is actually on the Breaking In section of the IGDA site somewhere (which the Education SIG does – although with random assorted IGDA members involved. I’d email Susan Gold about it if there isn’t a mention there already).
So, there is pretty much only advantages with this it seems! Helping on the organisational side might be something we can help with too – a student SIG (with our proposed news feed and newsletter) would be a simple way to get at the student IGDA members, of course.
Alumni, I hope (since I’m one) and likely some developers will also be Student SIG members, so the promotion won’t just be active students, and no doubt there will be possibly new mentors from that area too – and people willing to put time into helping organise it too – one thing students do have is usually more time then professionals, and this is one great way I’m sure of not just helping others, but getting help 🙂
I’ll make a note of this specifically, since it is already active, for the SIG to work on once it’s formalised and has an active membership, which will occur when the new website is started, we hope.