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Okay so this update is a few days late. SIGGRAPH 2007 is over since last Thursday night and I’m back home in Toronto, but just to finish off what I started…

Job Fair:

I spent about an hour or so of the morning of the last day at the job fair. There were surprisingly a lot of game companies there than there were animation studios, at least from my impression of it. Some of them that were there and had a chance to get around to were Vivendi, Radical, Blizzard, Sega, Monolith, Sony Online, Midway, and Microsoft Game Studios. Activision, which now has publishing rights to Guitar Hero, was there too but I didn’t get around to seeing them.

The majority of the game companies at the job fair are located in the States, and I asked them if they would consider hiring someone like myself from Canada. Most of the responses that I got from the “smaller” firms like Vivendi, Blizzard, and Monolith aren’t too keen on hiring someone from outside the US because of the issues and hassles of getting a work VISA in the US. The other companies like Sega and Microsoft have no problem hiring people from both countries. One of the reps at Sega even told me that there’s a handful of Canadians there right now. Unlike most of the companies, Radical is located in Canada so there is no issues with them.

After having spoken with the companies who don’t hire outside of the US, it did disappoint me a little bit but that’s not really an obstacle for me. There are quite a few game studios in Canada in addition to Microsoft and Sega that I could apply too once I’m done with school. All I need is just to get my foot in the door and I’m set.

The last shift:
Worked the last shift at the store which ended when SIGGRAPH ended at 6pm. The store was almost emptied out by the attendees and I wanted to get a shirt for myself but they were all gone…

No Guerrilla Studios:
Because of my shift, I didn’t get any chance to step in to the Guerrilla Studios. Which is too bad because there was a chance to create a physical miniature model of any of your own models from a file. They were also making custom dog tags which would’ve been cool to have.

Swag for student volunteers (SVs):
Just for volunteering, all students got a free academic copy of SoftImage’s XSI 3D modelling/animating tool! We also got a 2-disc CDROM of the SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference Select, which has electronic copies of papers and some other documentation stuff from this year’s conference. SV awards were handed out to a few, and many students were on the “fabulous list” and were given prizes. I saw a lot of copies Corel PainterX and PaintShop Pro Photo XI, which I think most SVs got but being a hardcore programmer, I decided to get these two books instead:

Next year?
I’m already thinking about volunteering again for next year… we’ll see. It’s been a blast. Thanks to the Team Leaders and Student Volunteer commitee for making it all happen!