I waited a long time to update my blog, partly because I’m wondering what sense it all makes, but also because I have been very busy. Tuesday we did our final presentation (slides) about Sweden. I really tried to make something good out of it, as the project itself didn’t go that well. We were asked easy questions which were not very critical, so I guess it was ok.

One strange question though : Ms. Van Achter didn’t quite understand why my mentor in Sweden approved that a friend was coming for 4 days on a holiday. Though I think this isn’t very weird when you are 3 full months abroad, our Swedish mentor even encouraged us to visit the country for a few days !

Tonight, her collegue Ms. Samyn, said something more reasonable. I told her about the fact that going abroad for an internship at a university doesn’t learn you very much, and she replied to me that going on Erasmus is more for the experience of being in another culture, than for the knowhow of business life, as you are still doing a project “on a school”.

So Ms. Van Achter, if we stayed working all days on the university, would that have given us the sense of living in another culture ? My opinion is that our school should focus more on companies for Erasmus students, or offer them a complete scholarship for a whole semester.
Other critics were given about the flashy layout (which was on purpose to comply with the official logo), and the numeration of the alternative flows in our uses cases (that happens when you teach something wrong.. or totally not). So nothing very serious. More important was that Ms. De Donder, one of the wisests teachers of our school, understood our frustations about the lack of contact with the assurance company, and the lack of information and guidance.

So now my studies as a programmer are finished. Tonight we had our second Alumni event. There were two presentations, the first one given by Sun about their server virtualisation. The beginning was very interesting, though I already knew a lot of it. But then the speaker went to technical, and eventually everybody was asleep.
Luckely there is always Microsoft to keep you awake. Their presentation about Web 2.0, brought by Luc Van de Velde, was suprisingly more interesting. Especially on the end when someone from the public asked the question (besides the only question during that night) if programmers should also have some graphical skills now. Dissapointed by his poor answer, I joined him on the drink afterwards, and asked the question again. The answer was too obvious : it’s good to have both skills because then you understand both worlds. But being specialised in programming is may be even better..

I’m a boy with many interests. Music, programming, design/graphics. I went to a music school, completed my piano lessons, did some violin, now guitar, and in 2 weeks I have my diploma as a programmer. I worked in public and private companies as an IT holiday student, volunteered in a youth organisation, and got international experience in Sweden.
But I’m confused. I know finding a job as a programmer today isn’t very difficult. Should I go to work, should I specialize my programming skills, or should I try to fullfill my last dream and study something with graphics ? And if I choose for the last option, should I go for a real graphical artistic scholarship, or something more like multimedia ?