It pit everything regarding college (including my lack of foresight) [weak/long]

The BBQ Pit
21

I’m now having serious doubts about the legitimacy of my AI aspiration. I really want to, but don’t think I can do it, my (obviously) poor decision making skills and attitude make that clear. Just know that between family, friends, teachers, counselors, tons of therapists, and medicine I’ve never been able to kick anything. The therapists figure out it probably has SOMETHING to do with my dad, and then go around in circles for a year and basically say “fuck all if I know.” Yes, therapists have actually given up on me. All it takes is one tiny trigger (me doing something wrong or offending someone) and I regress to 4th grade in terms of all that stuff in the post quoted by a lot of you. I’m more lucid now, but I overreact for brief half-hour to few-hour bouts and end up feeling really sick.

As such, I’m not sure if going towards my dream is prudent, or if I should just settle for less for my life, like food service. I really want to do AI, I’ve learned a lot of programming and lower level stuff, and philosophy to help, and I want to make games, hence why I keep talking about DigiPen (and yes, I realize I may still have to work bottom-up for AI if I got CS there, unless someone knows different). But everyone is making it clear that it ain’t gonna happen, because schooling won’t cut it for me because of my issues. :frowning:

I’m actually fairly certain I can get into a 4 year, I was accepted to quite a few (including one Ivy) my senior year, it’s not like I took this because it was the only thing I could get in to, it was a conscious, moronic decision on my part because I was thinking the words “Game Design focused” (don’t know why, would’ve been better off with CS I’m guessing) and “Semi-local” since I didn’t think I could cope with homesickness.

22

Dude. Don’t give up on your dreams just cause you fucked up once. If you want to do it, go for it.

23

If you just graduated from high school in May or June, then I think you may want to approach one of the schools that accepted you. Tell them that you made a bad decision not to accept their offer of admission, and can you still go there? Now, I have no idea if this will work, but they may be willing to let you start in January or next September. But I’m a little old-fashioned and tend to think you’re better off attending a conventional not-for-profit public or private college or university rather than the one you’re now attending or Digipen.

24

I keep thinking Digipen because I have not heard a bad thing about it. The reviews glow so much you could mistake them for radioactive, and they place in the professional category at the GDC every year (since '04 at least).

However they only start every September anyway, I’d probably catch the U of A’s next term (Jan I think) and ride that until enrollment there anyway, so either way I have some time.

25

Based on the in-state tuition costs only, the University of Arizona looks a lot cheaper than Digipen. And I recommend attending a well-rounded university rather than one narrowly focused on technology.

26

Fair enough, I’m starting to wish I would have applied to MIT though, considering that really is the “place to be” as far as general comp sci goes. I’d try but:

  1. I don’t think my senior grades were super-awesome-amazing enough.
  2. Since I’m out of High School getting the necessary teacher recommendations would be an absolute pain. I really dropped the ball not thinking about MIT last year.
27

There’s no need to attend the absolute best undergrad programs in the world to get into grad school. Going to a good state school and doing well will work just fine.

28

True, I think I’ll just go to the U of A, maybe that would work best. If I keep my grades and extracurricular activities up maybe I can get into some Stanford/UC Berkley/MIT thing for the higher levels. And looking at Digipen, you have no free time. With the U of A I can still work on games, it just has to be in teh Free Time category and I’ll be qualified to do other things on top of games if I so choose.

29

This. Would you like to hear how many times I’ve fucked up and taken wrong turns pursuing my dreams, Jragon? Pull up a chair and grab some coffee, because I could talk about it all fucking night.

But guess what? I’ve learned and grown from my mistakes, and all these years later, I’m pushing 40, and I’m in a great marriage, and I’ve gotten my education, and my job . . . Well, OK, actually my job kind of sucks, but it’s not going to last forever, and I’ve gone quite a bit further in life than I would have if I’d just sat back and said, “Well, I’ve made a mistake. I guess I’ll punish myself for the rest of my life.” 20 years ago.

Here’s the thing. Sure you fucked up. Everyone everywhere fucks up all the time. That’s just life. It all comes down to learning from your mistakes and getting on with it. And also trying not to make the same mistake more than once (I say “trying” because I firmly believe that everyone fucks up the same way more than once from time to time.). Life is about confusion and error as much as it’s about finding your way and enjoying success. Even the most successful people aren’t perfect. They just know how to learn from their mistakes and adapt. As the saying goes “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.”

I’m not telling you to somehow zen your way out of this and not feel bad. But please stop beating yourself up. And stop punishing yourself for your mistakes!! Depending on your screw-ups, there are people out there who are paid to punish you, and from what I’ve seen, they tend to like their jobs, and you shouldn’t take their satisfaction away by doing their jobs for them.

There are two steps to solving every screw-up. You’ve already done the first step by admitting your mistake. The second step is moving on.

30

Digipen is accredited by the same national association as your current college, so you will run into the same problems with transferring and continuing your education there.

Digipen and (even your current college) may provide a perfectly good education to their target population - but you’re not it. Institutions accredited by ACCSCT are generally speaking, the descendants of trade schools. In fact, some of them started as trade schools and later began granting degrees. Their target population is people who want to get a degree or certificate and get right to work and generally their programs are light on the general education requirements and electives and more focused on the major. For example, my bachelor’s required 30 credits in courses required for my major and about 55 credits in core requirements. On the other hand, Digipen’s general education requirements mostly seem to be major related- no General Biology, but visual perception and both animal and human anatomy. No Introduction to Law, but Introduction to Intellectual Property and Contracts.

Getting a bachelor’s from either your current school or Digipen is not a great idea if you want an advanced degree. You will probably have difficulty being admitted to a graduate program with those degrees, and many undergraduate programs won’t admit you if you already have a similar degree. You really are better off going to a traditional non-profit university- if nothing else, it gives you more flexibility. Almost everyone I know changed majors at least once. ( plus, Digipen’s tuition is sky-high)

Here’s one poece of advice you definitely should take - talk to someone who knows about college. I’m guessing that most of your family is either not college-educated or have vocational degrees. If so, they can’t help you. See if you can speak to your high school guidance counselor, or a favorite teacher , or anyone else you might know who has gone further than a bachelor’s degree

31

U of A is a great school and would be a good choice, but if you’re interested in shooting high, and you’ve already had an offer from an Ivy League school, you should be aware that Penn has very strong graphics and AI groups in their CS department. You might want to take a look there.

32

Sayeth the grad school professor:

Get out now, if you have aspirations of getting that degree and going further to grad school. You’re wasting your time and money, and trust me, you will be kicking yourself for spinning your wheels at the current institution you attend. As others have noted, you’ll be perfectly fine at a CC taking basic courses (mindful of which will transfer to the 4 year of your choice).

I think there are ways to indulge your interest in programming that are extracurricular. Doing an internship for course credit, part-time work, whatever.

As others have noted you seem to have issues that you need to straighten out somewhat because you’re setting up a self-defeating cycle by punishing yourself this way. Everybody screws up in life… whatever mistakes you’ve made before, you’ve got to own up to them, take responsibility and make amends if possible, and forgive yourself and move on.

I hope this works out for you!

33

I’ve been in the game industry for 12 years. I started off as a programmer. Now I’m a designer. Here’s my advice, for what it’s worth.

Start making plans to leave your current school and transfer to a Computer Science program at a decent four-year university. That’s your safest route to get into the industry. You don’t need to go to a game-specific program like Digipen. Going to a game-specific school isn’t a bad decision, but it is a riskier approach. Some students parley their senior projects into start-up companies. But others wind up with a mediocre background in programming that isn’t really applicable to other programming jobs.

A B.S. in Computer Science is practically a guarantee of lifetime employment. A good programmer can always find a decent job somewhere. I worked as a programmer for ten years before I broke into the game industry. If you get a C.S. degree you’re preparing yourself for the game industry, but you’re also giving yourself a safety net if something goes wrong. Or if you change your mind about what sort of career you want.

All that design and art stuff you get in a game school? It isn’t really that useful for an entry-level coder in the industry. It’s a nice bit of chrome on your resume, and it might be useful for you in the long term in your career, but game development is very compartmentalized these days. Programmers don’t make art and they do very little design. When a game company is looking at you as a possible employee what they care about is if you can fill the specific coding needs they have right now. They don’t care if you can play-balance a combat system or lay out a level.

A couple of other points:

Game A.I. is very different than mainstream A.I. research. Don’t be misled by the similar names. Game A.I. is mostly path-finding and state machines. It has almost no overlap with neural nets, expert systems, visual systems, or any other research topics in artificial intelligence.

Don’t worry about being weird or anti-social. There are lots of weird anti-social game programmers. It’s practically expected.

You DESERVE to succeed. Well … as much as any of us deserve it. Don’t sabotage yourself out of some misguided sense that you need to be punished. Let the universe take care of punishing you. You should focus on making the absolute most of yourself.

If you don’t know about Tom Sloper’s website yet, check it out. He’s been in the industry for, like, forever, and has tons of advice for people who want to break in. He can be very blunt at times, but his advice is sound.

34

If you want recommendations for schools, my alma mater, Rensselaer, has a degree program in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences. And as long as you don’t mind cold upstate New York winters, it’s a great place to go to school.

35

Sayeth the former Grad School Admissions Officer (and pissant Grad School Lecturer):

Get out NOW. You are going to a trade school that will NEVER get you into a PhD program of worth. It MIGHT get you a good job working for Blizzard or other game firms - but this is not the path you appear to desire.

Call the Stanford & MIT admissions offices. Ask them what accreditations they consider to be legit for admissions to their Masters level programs. Then you should only look at schools with those levels of accreditation.

A comment for thread surfers - the University of California does not accept ITT, Devry or National as legit undergraduate degrees (or at least did not 5 years ago when I was doing admissions work). I repeatedly sent away applicants with degrees from those schools.

For your path - a Community College can start you, and then you can transfer into a 4-year university for your degree. That is a fine model, and can save you a lot of money. Stanford and MIT both take transfer students (very few - but they do take them) every year.

36

Well, I think I’ve got it settled. I’m going to the U of A in January it appears (I’d go out of state, but there’s various logistical issues now and the U of A is a good school anyway), working towards a masters at MIT/Stanford/Berkley etc. I’m doing the next 10 week term at this school because… well… I have nothing better to do really and I might as well get something out of it roughly related to my preferred industry instead of just working at Wal-Mart or Gamestop for four months. This way I can also tie up various issues with my two friends and we can work out stuff for our game after we become longer distance, not like it’s not only a two hour drive anyway (if we all still want to work on it, since I was mostly programming/music anyway this will probably work even better for us).

37

Good for you!

38

Glad to hear it as well. Now lighten up and celebrate a little!

39

Oh, one more thing -

I realize this, but I’m interested in both types. (I’m a flagrant transhumanist and trans-transhumanist on top of a game enthusiast too so…)
I’ve also been interested in reconciling some of that non-symmetry between the two… er… “fields.” (Though one is more an application than a field) I think (for random instance) the principles of a neural net based AI in a game could go pretty far, if implemented correctly.

I would, but dagummit, I forgot to bring my pocket watch with all my imprisoned human souls, what am I supposed to snack on while celebrating?

40

You’re not the first person to think along these lines. There are a couple reasons that the two communities take very different approaches to AI.

First, if you give the player’s opponents the ability to actually learn, you end up with opponents that can beat the player mercilessly all the time (consider Logistello). It’s a neat concept, but you’ll have a little trouble marketing games with that sort of feature.

Second, the problems that have to be solved in game AI are often orders of magnitude simpler than the problems that academic researchers are addressing. A robot’s vision has to mimic ours to the greatest extent possible, but a computer game character’s vision simply consists of a list of things they can see.