Jansepar.com

I guess my goal of post­ing once a week failed. I don’t know why really, I have a lot more free time now that I’m work­ing full time with­out hav­ing homework.

In case any­one is won­der­ing, so far EA has been great. The peo­ple are fun to work with, they are quite easy going and will­ing to help me out with any prob­lems or ques­tions I have. I was con­cerned for the first cou­ple of days because of how lit­tle expe­ri­ence I had com­pared to the peo­ple I was work­ing with, but that worry has been put to rest. They really encour­age me to learn as much as I can, and I’m def­i­nitely all for it.

Now, the ques­tion is, what do I pre­fer, work­ing an 8 hour shift and going home with no imme­di­ate respon­si­bil­i­ties, or going to school with a pile of home­work? Whats more appeal­ing? Well, to tell you the truth I dont have an answer to that ques­tion, at least not at the moment. They both have their ups and downs. One of the obvi­ous ben­e­fits of work­ing an 8 hour day is that when I come home, I can do what­ever the hell I want, with­out hav­ing to worry about fin­ish­ing off my math assign­ment or read­ing a mil­lion pages from some his­tory book. But when it comes to school, there are days were the home­work won’t be so bad, there will be long stretches of not much to do at all, and then you’ll get hit by a tsunami of home­work and study­ing for two weeks straight. It all depends on what you want, and how highly you rank con­sis­tency in your life.

Maybe its just me, but in the last 5 semes­ters, I’ve con­stantly had courses that I’ve had to do, and I’ve con­stantly have had home­work pil­ing up, and its started to become rou­tine. My first two semes­ters were hell, but I’ve become used to the struc­ture of the uni­ver­sity life, and frankly, its quite a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence only hav­ing to work. One of my major con­cerns when start­ing at EA was adjust­ing to a full 8 hour work day. Back in the day when I worked at Wal-mart, I worked all the time, because the job required my con­stant atten­tion, but when I got my job at SFU, very lit­tle work was required. I’m expected to do my job when I need to, and when there is noth­ing to do, I’m not expected to do any­thing, nor do I seek it out. I’ve been doing that for a good year and a half, so I feared that I wouldn’t be able to work for 30 min­utes with­out tak­ing a break by find­ing the lat­est funny video, read­ing a new arti­cle on digg, or chat on MSN. Luckly the tran­si­tion wasn’t very dif­fi­cult, because I’m moti­vated at this job.

The ques­tion is, how long will it be until one runs out of moti­va­tion. EA might be a bad exam­ple, because with the way the com­pany is struc­tured, and with all the great ben­e­fits they offer to their employ­ees, it seems like it would be hard to run out of moti­va­tion. But I’m sure that if I was to do another coop at some other com­pany (unless it was Google), then it would be a big step down, and maybe school would seem a lot more appeal­ing at that point. Its all about how well a com­pany moti­vates you with­out push­ing you over the edge. Its a good thing I don’t plan on work­ing for any­one when I grad­u­ate .

While it is nice to come home from work and have noth­ing to do, being at school forces you to have lots of things to do, things that usu­ally force peo­ple to inter­act with one and other, and since it starts over every 5 months, you’re con­stant meet­ing new peo­ple. That’s gen­er­ally the part I like more about school then work, the fact that inter­ac­tion with a lot of DIFFERENT peo­ple is a lot more fre­quent, which can be scary for some peo­ple, but its some­thing that I enjoy. And this isn’t say­ing that I don’t meet peo­ple at EA, because I’d say each day I meet as many new peo­ple at EA as I do at SFU. But the thing is, the peo­ple I meet at EA are gen­er­ally all of the same type, and lets just say there is a sig­nif­i­cantly smaller ratio of men to women then there is at SFU. Now, if you’re the type who just goes to school, does there home­work, and noth­ing else, then I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that work is def­i­nitely your pref­er­ence. But if you take advan­tage of what your post-secondary insti­tu­tion has to offer in terms of get­ting involved with the school, then you’re going to miss these things at a com­pany (unless the com­pany has a great cul­ture that allows you to get involved). At SFU, I get envolved with soci­eties and clubs as much as can, whether it be run­ning my own club or work­ing with my department’s stu­dent soci­ety, and its these kinds of things that I would miss from work­ing at some run of the mill company.

At the moment, I love work­ing at EA. I love what I do, I love what I’m learn­ing, its just an over­all great place to work. The ques­tion is, will there be a day when I go to work, and I feel like I’m not being chal­lenged enough. When it comes to a full time job, the day you step into that facil­ity, and you are no longer being chal­lenged, you bet­ter either find another project to work on within the com­pany (EA actu­ally encour­ages this, which is a great benifit), or find some­thing you’re pas­sion­ate about. Basi­cally, the rea­son I can’t answer the ques­tion at hand is because right now, I’m feel­ing more moti­vated and chal­lenged then ever. But I could see that chang­ing, and not specif­i­cally with EA, but with any nine to five job. I’m get­ting a taste of real life right now, and while its great, I’m guess­ing that when its all said and done I’m going to look back s and real­ize that those care­free days of sleep­ing through lec­tures were the best of my life.

I guess we’ll see ten years from now if I’m right.

So, today was my first day of work, although it wasn’t really “work”, it was an ori­en­ta­tion to get us started with every­thing. One of the first things we had to do was sign Non-Disclosure Agree­ments (sorry every­one, that means I won’t be dish­ing out any inside secrets!), and a bunch of other minor details, such as get­ting paid and such . The peo­ple there are pretty cool, and I ran into Cur­tis there, which was unex­pected. The major­ity of the co-ops there are from UBC and Water­loo, there was only about 3 SFU stu­dents out of 30 co-ops, which is sur­pris­ing since I thought SFU was a bet­ter CS school then UBC…

The cam­pus is one of the most amaz­ing build­ings I have ever been in. Foos­ball, pool, soc­cer, hockey rinks, bas­ket­ball courts, beach vol­ley­ball courts, you name it, its all there at my dis­posal. And there are games every­where, on every floor, free arcades and every­thing. I’m really look­ing for­ward to play­ing NHL 2009, I hope its playable right now! I also get games for $20 bucks, and I think I can get some for friends, so, any requests?

The most mind­blow­ing thing for me was the fact that the gym is open 24/7. Thats right, its open all the time, and I THINK they said I can get a pass for one per­son (or it might have been for reg­u­lar employ­ees, not 100% sure, I’ll have to check on that). Not sure who I’m going to give that to, I want to give it to some­one who would get the most use out of it.

Besides all that, we got an exten­sive tour of the whole build­ing, as well as some man­di­tory pre­sen­ta­tions about poli­cies and prac­tices, noth­ing too excit­ing. Tomor­row all the co-ops have to do a Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing infor­ma­tion ses­sion, and then Wednes­day I finally get to meet the team I’ll be work­ing with! I’ll post about that stuff at the end of the week. I would post every day, but I’m lazy, so I won’t make that promise.