I'll be graduating college by the end of the year. Usually by this time, students would be looking for jobs to hop in once they finish school. As for me, I might be delayed a bit. My portfolio as a programmer is lacking, mainly because I just never worked on any quality projects (I know, mock me if you want, I deserve it).

Anyway, I really need to focus on building up a good portfolio which will involve some time getting portfolio worthy projects in. In the meantime, I will still need to find a full-time job to support myself and student loans. Some people have suggested me to look in to QA Testing since it's one way to somewhat break in to industry. Others have suggested I freelance.

I'm not really sure what to do, and I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/suggestions for jobs and whatnot. Something that could hold me up as I work on building my proof of experience up.

Any help relative to this is appreciated.

Why limiting yourself in that way? Ask for any job you have some interest in. Maybe you are right and you have no chance, but let other decide it. You may be lucky [wink]. In the meantime you can work on some personal projects and create a better portfolio.

So rather than limit my opportunities, take whatever opportunities I can or want to take; thus, allowing myself getting a better chance at landing a job. In the meantime, I could be working on my portfolio/projects as I await responses/interviews.

I suppose it makes sense. If anything, I'll pull interview experience from it all. I'm just getting pretty stressed out because graduation is coming soon, student loans will be coming soon after.

You should be able to defer the student loans until you get a job. I ran into similar problems once I graduated. As soon as I landed an internship somewhere, I was able to start payments, but once that ended, I had to put it on hold until I found something new.

Persist, get some interview experience, and be yourself. Interviews are stressful at first, but after a couple you get an idea of what they look for, and why - and how to match yourself up with potential employers better. Of course, sometimes it winds up being blind luck. :)

Yeah, I think I have a six month grace period with my student loans when I finish this semester. Not sure what I can do after that. I figured that's when interest starts becoming serious. I suppose I better get to more job searching and applying; otherwise, my parents will not be happy if they find out I haven't applied anywhere yet.

You might consider applying for some other software programming positions outside of games. If you want to be a programmer, the best experience is programming. Testing does help some people get into programming positions, but in my opinion the skill sets are quite different.

Anyway, just a suggestion. Besides, if games doesn't work out (or is delayed for whatever reason) you'll have real-world experience to fall back on, to get a job in other software sectors.

Quote: Original post by strtok
You might consider applying for some other software programming positions outside of games. If you want to be a programmer, the best experience is programming. Testing does help some people get into programming positions, but in my opinion the skill sets are quite different.

Anyway, just a suggestion. Besides, if games doesn't work out (or is delayed for whatever reason) you'll have real-world experience to fall back on, to get a job in other software sectors.

If you take this route, be sure to start a personal portfolio and do some hobby game development during your free time. It's the route I am taking now. It may sound like having two jobs but if you truly want to get into the game dev industry, you'll have to go through this ordeal to gain some real experience.