GDC this year was from March 25 from 29. And what a week it was for me! I got to attend awesome and informative sessions, meet some of my idols and professionals in the industry, and got to know the opportunities and competition that lie ahead.
I realised that GDC is the only place we can get to network with people from the industry and a good place to gauge the competition and get to know the direction the industry is taking currently. Hope to get an internship out of this and hopefully a job by next year.
The first 2 days were conferences and the rest 3 days were expos. I attended the math conference on Monday and the Physics conference on Tuesday. Both were very informative.
It was from Wednesday that things got exciting. I had met Noah Hughes, the Creative Director of Crystal Dynamics and he had invited me to a lunch meet on Wednesday. Got to meet the team at Crystal Dyanmics and their Lead Rendering and AI programmers. Also met a lot of other grad students. Had a lot of interesting conversations, but alas, they didnt have any internship opportunities.
I started going around the career booths on Wednesday. Most companies said they dont do interns. But, I noticed that if I talked a bit about my work to them , they ask me to contact them via mail for internships.
Also, I noticed that the people I wanted to talk to, didnt come to the expo floor. Most were at the conference areas. So, I hung around there and caught up with people from EA, Activision, Blizzard, Microsoft, Irrational and a lot more.
On Thurday, I was looking out for people from Netherrealm studios, my dream company (As I am a huge fighting game fan, esp of Mortal Kombat). I literally got to speak with everyone who came to GDC from Netherrealm and it was AWESOME! Got some contacts and hope to follow it up.
The last day, I literally did a swag run and came back to SLC with 2 bags of swag.
