Written by Steve Zhang 2018 cohort
At the end of this month, I will officially graduate from the Master of Digital Media in Centre for Digital Media.
I took the Pre-MDM program as the starter of this journey in the fall of 2018 with the intention to further educate and elevate my career in the tech industry.
The Pre-MDM program has been quite the journey, and there have been tons of things that I learned which I will appreciate forever.
As well as hands-on projects that help me knock the gate for the job offers, which I believe has made me a better employee and team-player. My intentions are not to convince you that you have to take the program, but to give you a better understanding of what you will get there.
1. How to solve problems
I still remembered from my first class, all the topics started with “why” and how to solve it. Even as a person who has an engineering background, I am still very grateful for the methods and tools to overcome the tendency to immediately come up with a solution and then to test and evaluate it in an appropriate and effective way. These takeaways got positively verified in pre-MDM and MDM projects and my future work.
2. How to maintain good mental health
This is quite interesting since it seems not related to the curriculums I had but this can be considered the most important takeaways from Dr. Aida Osian’s class. I am a person who has been always pursuing perfectionism, which sometimes made me push myself and my team to exhaustion. And the story ends when Aida taught me to drop the “must”. Here is just a tiny story that demonstrates in her class what you will learn is not just all about language as an ESL student taking grad studies, but a lot of psychological theories and healthy lifestyle-developing that might help you find the right pace in your life.
3. How to act smarter in the workplace
It can be concluded as a fusion of all the courses in Pre-MDM. Pitch & Presentation helped me become more confident in public speaking. English in Digital Media built my technical language ability. In terms of what I learned from Technical Writing, it reflects dynamically in my daily work nowadays, from emails communicating with the clients to address technical documents to all the hands-on experience building a solid foundation for teamwork and other soft-skills.