May 16, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR ESHE PICKETT IN IL
I currently work primarily with Illustrator, Freehand, and Photoshop as development tools in graphic design, however I have done internships where my focus was more web or application based design and I used flash as a development tool, so it really depends on what aspect of the industry you intend to focus on. From my personal experience and that of friends who are also in the IT industry, projects are definitely something you will do a lot of.
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A: FROM MENTOR AIMEE WILLOZ IN MN
It really depends on what industry you work in. For example, I work in
disk drive firmware. Because it's an embedded system, there's no human
interface, but we do use flash on the drives to store the firmware.
Software that's written for computers that have a human interface (i.e., PC
software, web programs, etc.) would have more elements of animation, etc.
The types of projects we do in disk drive firmware is to implement
different functions in the drive -- for example, a drive has a cache, which
is used to temporarily store data, in addition to the permanent storage on
the discs themselves. You might write firmware to parse through the tables
that tell us what data is stored in the cache and return the appropriate
data (depending on the command from the host). Okay, that's pretty
detailed, but I hope it give you an idea of the type of thing that happens
in disk drive firmware. A lot of the projects that we do relate to
implementing and testing customer-unique features. The customers have
quite a few things that they want to behave in a very specific way, so we
create a unique version of firmware for them that implements their
requests. As far as programs we use, there are a lot of tools we use (both
software and software+hardware), such as compilers to build the firmware so
we can load it onto the drive, as well as debug tools such as bus analyzers
and in-circuit emulators. So, maybe this sounds boring to some people, but
I really like it! :-)
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A: FROM MENTOR JEN FAIRCHILD IN MA
It all depends on what type of technology career you choose. If you
decide to create video games, design web sites, or work in a marketing
department, you will be using fantastic software to do these projects.
In my technology field, I do not use any fun programs... I use software
that tells me if any of the computers aren't feeling well, which is not very
exciting!
If you really enjoy that software, you may want to get a graphic
design education so that you can get on these types of projects!