This time around, I want to talk about my experiences about the idea of relating computer science and programming to computer art and animation. When I was first starting out college my freshman year, which was at another school, I was a computer science major. I had planned on doing that all throughout highschool pretty much and had worked a little with programming. My first semester of college, I signed up for Programming 1 and started trying to learn Java in that class. About two weeks into it I found myself completely lost, beginning to fail and fall farther and farther behind, and I was miserable with the class, finding no joy in learning those skills. Needless to say, I dropped the class and seriously reconsidered my career plans. I ended up getting into graphics under the art program and eventually ended up here learning animation.

As I was getting permission from my professor to drop Programming, she talked to me about double majoring in computer science and graphics. She was explaining to me how people who have both sets of skills are very marketable. My reaction to this was that I wished I did not have a growing hate for programming. Being very marketable would have been nice, but my brain simply did not function in the way needed to be a successful programmer and my heart was not in it at all.

With that experience in the past now, I have great respect for the programmers of the world. In my opinion, if they go through the trouble of learning how to program and are willing to do it full time, they deserve to be very marketable. In the end, it turns out that I am a storyteller at heart with a proficiency for technology, for there is no room for emotion or fantasy in the world of logic and algorithms.

The relatedness of digital art/animation and computer science, though, is very clear to me. For the field would not exist without the tools that have been programmed. Oddly enough, I have found myself having a slight return to some computer science in the form of designing a web site from code and maintaining it effectively. It turns out if I have a specific creative purpose in mind for some aspect of computer science, then my interest in that aspect soars. Without the creative vision however, I must admit that I'd just assume leave the programming to those more interested and with logical minds. Perhaps I just can't get my head out of the clouds for very long.