Marta Ziółkowska

Game development

In the name of science

The moment I saw the name of a new specialization from the Faculty of Computing, I already knew that nobody would stop me from participation.

GAMES AND WEB TECHNOLOGIES” – every thought in my head was screaming to me! It was no way to calm down, no chance to get back!

I have decided to start my master’s course at Poznań University of Technology, which is considered as one of the leading technical universities in Poland.

My excitement was tangled with fear. I’ve acquired my bachelor’s degree at a private university, so I was anxious about any public school. There are a lot of bad opinions about public universities in Poland. People say that if you don’t pay for education, nobody cares about you. There are so many free courses participants, that is even better if you fail an exam, so It would be less crowded. The lecturers are rude, revengeful, narcissistic – can be heard in whispers.
Having this in mind I decided to sacrifice my pride in the name of science.

After a month of study at the PUT, I could not disagree more with the opinions above. I have no idea of why people say so, the academic atmosphere is really great!
Maybe, I just have a little bit of luck and all of the misfortunes just spared me?

Adaptation processes are going very well. Most of the students in my group know each other from the Bachelor course. Instead of alienating me and treating like a stranger, they have welcomed me with open arms. They taught me about university habits, believes and social life. They were helpful when I got lost in the labyrinth of corridors for the hundredth time and patient when I was asking obvious questions for them or indulgent when I was forgetting their names at the beginning.

Not, that I’m complaining for my previous classmates, but they didn’t treat me serious no matter how hard I’ve worked. I’ve never heard any chauvinistic jokes referred to me as a woman minority here. Finally, I’m surrounded by really hard-working, talented but humble students.

And If you don’t have a technical education don’t picture them as ugly, geek types. Their lives are ordinary, just like the lives of not science-related people: they like going to the gym or cinema, drinking beer, etc. Some of them have also different interests than a computer, like a stage acting, story writing or even singing in the church choir. Without a doubt, each of them is very unique!

 

The lecturers are very open-minded. Most of them are very timely ones and teach about the newest and forward-looking technologies and techniques.
For example, we are learning only open source web technologies in order to start our own companies with a low budget. These technologies are also very trendy, so employers seek this kind of skill very often.
On games programming classes we are going to learn about Unreal Engine 4, AI bots fight on the arena and would be able to develop our own projects in each game engine we want to.

I’m quite disappointed that there aren’t more subjects related to game development. It’s such a pity! Lecturers are trying to help game enthusiasts with self-developing, so they give us freedom with projects subject choices and that is a good recompensation. To don’t waste my time I’ve decided to create a game with micropayments for E-commerce classes.
To keep oneself amused we were even analyzing computer and board games while playing them on digital product lessons.

Our lectures are also marketing, business and management orientated, so even students from different specializations are voluntarily participating in our classes from time to time.

This is not a university commercial, I truly enjoy studying here (just maybe because the examination session did not start yet :))

To summarize: I’m really satisfied with the freedom of project choices, the atmosphere of the classes and people I met here. There is no better place to study in Poznań.

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