So here we are, the dawn of the final day. (Wow, a Zelda reference from someone who hasn’t played a Zelda game before!) It’s kinda sad to finally be at the end point, but I can successfully say that this week has been pretty good. Definitely one of the weeks of all time.
At this point, I should be checking off a bingo sheet of things I’ve said during these blog posts, for the simple reason of why not. That and I’m starting to notice all the patterns I keep consciously and subconsciously making, and in doing so, just how predictable my writing style is. 😂
So here is my bingo sheet – yes, I did spend like half an hour on this. If I’m gonna make a joke I’m at least gonna do it properly. Feel free to play along, see if we get a bingo at all.
Oh yeah, and by the way, I’m gonna be rambling a lot during this post. It’s a summary of my entire week, so there’s a lot to talk about.
Anyway, without further ado, let’s roll.
Day 1 💻
Day 1, I have to say, was a cracking start to my week. Not only did I meet some lovely individuals, I was welcomed to the team (if only for a week) with open arms, and I even got to mess around with a computer and install a virtual machine – y’know, the techie stuff. >:3 As the shy, socially anxious person that I am, I was of course pretty nervous going into this. I mean, how could I not? It was a new environment with new people for six hours a day for five days, no less. Yeah, you could say I was a wee bit intimidated by this idea. It’s at this point that I should probably be honest and say I wasn’t particularly sure what to expect from Cosmic. It really could have swung either way: it could have been purely designing websites and building them from the ground up (best case scenario), or it could have been the dullest thing imaginable. So imagine how mildly confused I am at the present moment, having neither of those outcomes been the case. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As I mentioned in my first blog post, my week started off by meeting Paul, who first greeted me and introduced me to everyone on the team who was there that day. On that topic, what I’ve found over the week is that less and less people were in as the week progressed, but again, I’ll get to that. This day in particular, in Office 3 there was me, Paul, Jon, and for a while, Darrius, who I only interacted with at the smallest degree, simply due to me doing stuff, and being a shy little bean. (Well I say “little”, I’m a six-footer, I dunno in what universe that’s considered little but alright-) Either way, where was I? In Office 4, there was a group of very nice people, the names of like half of which I don’t remember because I was more focused on “Let’s not look like a complete idiot in front of these grown adults, mkay?”. After the introductions to these nice people were over and done with, I met Jon, who helped me in the aforementioned installing of a Linux Mint virtual machine on the Windows laptop I’ve been working on this week. I’m also writing this part of this post on said laptop, but I dunno how much I’m gonna get done before 4 so I’ll probably end up finishing it on my MacBook. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure I mentioned in one of my last posts (don’t ask me which one), but I’m still gonna have to get re-used to how my MacBook works, cuz there are some pretty noticeable differences. For pretty much the whole week I’ve been kind of half in the mindset of how this laptop works, and half in the mindset of how mine works, which effectively results in me being able to use neither properly. 😂 Anyway, my point is, some pretty cool stuff happened on Day 1.
(Oh, and I showed Jon two of my W.I.P. video games, Tobis Cube and Halloween Project 3. He liked them and advised that I keep those skills, which, I was planning to anyway, but I always welcome the validation. :3
Day 2 📝
Day 2 started off with me heading straight into the offices, and meeting Jamie and Liam: The Web Lads (Part 1). In stark contrast to Day 1, I wasn’t doing several smaller tasks over the course of however long they took each, but rather doing one much longer task over the course of the whole six hours. (Well I say that, I ended up doing about… 70% of it on Day 2 – I did the rest of it today on Day 5.) Either way, I can confirm that I was sat down for the entire six hours. Not particularly good for my body but oh well, it’s pretty much been and done now. Can’t change the past. While I was working on my task however – an article about different CMSs – I was accompanied by some absolute 🔥 FIRE 🔥 beats, which is always a plus. Speaking of fire beats, while I’m writing this, I am still listening to Stream Cafe’s music. What can I say, it’s good to have on while you work. Anyway, that’s pretty much all I have to say about Day 2 at this point. It was straightforward, it was alright. :3
Day 3 🧠
Day 3 was, I have to say, the most different and difficult out of the five. It was also the day that caused me the most anxiety, but ah, details. Upon entering Office 3, I met Ben and Pete. After a few minutes of getting my stuff sorted out, Pete took me into the lobby and explained my task for the day: to handle a makeshift scenario about a potential client. Now this is a good point to come back to the fact that I am not great at social interaction, even makeshift interaction. After learning about myself over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that my problem is that I can and will literally have empathy for, and feel bad for, abstract concepts. You know, like you would with people. But with abstract concepts that have absolutely no emotional quality and literally cannot feel emotion as a result. Socialising is hard. 😭 So like I said in my Day 3 post, what happens if you take a shy socially anxious person who doesn’t really know what they’re doing and is too shy to ask anyone, and put them in front of a computer for six hours? Not a lot, actually. 🙂 To be fair though, that’s not to say I got nothing done. I did get a thing done on the day I said I didn’t get a lot of things done, which is in itself a thing I got done- I’m confusing everyone again. This is who you accepted to join you, what can I say?
Also, I finally went outside and ✨touched grass ✨ (That’s a popular internet phrase for going outside. Not a lot of us touch grass on the internet, so it’s a highly respectable achievement amongst our peers. A hard to achieve rank, The Grass Toucher.)
After respectfully touching grass, I was greeted to some more 🔥 FIRE 🔥 beats, this time including everything from some very nice guitar (which I play by the way) and the most BANGER JAPANESE MUSIC THE PLANET HAS TO OFFER. Despite learning Japanese, I can only say a few things. Here, check this out.
私は日本出身です (Translation: I am from Japan)
See? I can lie in Japanese, how awesome is that?
All in all, by the end of Day 3, I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about Days 4 and 5. Not only was I dreading the concept of Teams/Zoom meetings, but I was also pretty emotionally exhausted from the anxiety I was feeling throughout like all of Day 3. Additionally, this post is now longer than the average Kit Work Experience post, so uh… take that how you will! ^v^’ Either way, my mindset leaving Day 3 was, “I’m tired, I’ll bet you a fiver that tomorrow’s gonna be the worst day of the five.” But moving onto Day 4-
Day 4 🎧
-Day 4 actually ended up being one of the best days of the five. HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN? I always say in these posts that I shouldn’t try to predict the future, because I will be wrong. (Also, just a quick side note, it’s now later in the day, and I’m writing the rest of this post on my MacBook at home. Finally a prediction I got correct.) Anyway, for the first time in the week, I was not stationed in Office 3, but instead Office 4, with two of the very nice ladies. Either way, I set up shop where the laptop I was using for the week was kindly stationed for me, and logged in, emotionally preparing to be anxious for the next two hours, but instead, I was told (without me asking by the way – someone in that office is a mind-reader, I tell you) that I could have my mic and camera off. In that moment all of the potential anxiety I could have been about to feel went “adios amigo” and left my soul, so like, I’ll take that as a win. Thus, the next two hours of my day were spent kinda just chilling out listening to this guy called Adrian talk about technology in relation to farming, and I can’t lie to you, it was pretty interesting. I can’t remember if I said this in my last post or not, (this is a recap though so it doesn’t really matter) but while I don’t live on a farm, I live literally right next to one, so I have experience occasionally looking at sheep or something of that nature. Also while I was on this call, I was having a life-or-death battle with a pair of flies.
Once the meeting ended, it was pretty much exactly 12pm, so I stopped to have lunch. Then, after successfully fighting off Jumbo Josh the fly (gold star if you get that reference ⭐️), at 1pm, hopping into a Teams meeting, I finally met the mystery lady who I’d shared my initial e-mails with, the final boss if you will of my work experience week, Emma. ✨ Turns out, she’s actually really nice! She’s probably reading this too – Hi! 😀 👋 Anyway, on our call, she gave me a couple of tasks to do, one of which being admin, and the other being a creative exercise, A.K.A. exactly what I do best. >:3 That and we had a little chat about what it is I do, which is always nice. ^v^
Anyway, I went over what I did for the two tasks in my last post, but I’ll quickly explain. For the admin task (which I genuinely didn’t realise was admin until I had finished), I had to rank 18 tasks in order of importance, in my opinion, and I had to make a poster about either whatever I wanted, or about a photography walk around Torquay. (which is somewhere I might have been to before, I don’t remember, I really don’t get outside much, I’m that introverted. Kinda puts into question how I managed to touch grass at all this week. Nice rambling, Kit.) Apparently, the poster in question ended up being absolutely ✨ banger ✨, so I’d call that a success. 😎
Plus, I managed to go outside again half-way through making the poster, just up to the Land Rover Experience a few minutes away to hand in some consent forms with one of the nice ladies. We had a lovely chat on the way there and back, I must say.
Anyway, I managed to finish up the poster at pretty much exactly 4pm, after which I actually sat in the lobby for a few minutes and worked on my game while being attacked by the fly again AAA-
Day 5 ❤️
And that leads us not only back to where we started, at the dawn of the final day, but also to the 2,000 work mark. This post is now twice as long as my others. Wow. 😅 It’s also pretty late as I’m writing this and I’m kinda tired, so I’ll make this as quick as I can. Day 5 started off with me walking into Office 4 again and being greeted by only one nice lady this time: Sarah, the office mum, who it turns out is actually the mother of someone I went to school with, and also happens to know a lot of the teachers. Small world. (Her words not mine.) The day was pretty straightforward all in all, mainly consisting of me just finishing up the CMSs article I started back on Day 2. After that, I started writing up this very blog post, then at around 3:45pm, I jumped into one final small Teams call with Emma just to round off the week nicely. Truly, a fitting end to an overall pretty nice week. ^v^
Final Thoughts ⭐️
Overall, I’m very thankful to have been given the opportunity to work for a week at Cosmic. Sure, there were points where anxiety went kinda BRRRRR, but don’t all things? That may very well be a me problem. Either way, the anxiety moments were definitely balanced out wth the good bits, A.K.A. Days 1, 4 and 5. Not to say that Days 2 and 3 weren’t good, but I’m just saying that Day 4 is where things kicked into high-tier yes. This was definitely a good choice for my work placement, and I’ve no doubt learned things that’ll be helpful in my career with developing video games. One thing I’ve come to learn doing this for *checks my non-existent watch* five years, is that no two days are ever the same, you’re always doing something different. Maybe one day I’ll be writing a fight theme, and the next day I’ll be writing the most chill and weirdly respectful NPC dialogue imaginable. Something I’ve learned here will come in handy inevitably! As I’ve said before, we’ll see what happens, but I can definitely see this being where I take myself in the future. And with that, I believe that’s a full house on the bingo card.
Have yourself a good one! ^v^ 👋
-Kit 🦊 ❤️