Marketing

Yourself

What are you aiming for?
Are you aiming at the right target?

Firstly, let's talk about...

what is the goal of a portfolio?

I am requiring you to create, keep, and update a resume, and we'll continue updating it here and there as we move through this course and any others you take with me. I'm not telling you what to put on it. Instead, I'm letting you decide. Ultimately, what you update your resume and portfolio with should be related to your goals.

But let's hear a bit more about portfolios from someone else.

portfolio.mp4

A portfolio helps you get
a job, a scholarship, or
some other sort of opportunity.

So, what's your goal?

What do you want to do after you finished your secondary education (6th-12th grade)?

Maybe it's related to your endorsement... ?

Do you want to work in or study STEM at university?

Then show off your science, tech, and other related work.

Do you want to work in arts and humanities, business and industry, or something else?

Show off the related skills for that endorsement.

Maybe it isn't related to your endorsement. That's fine too.

Whatever you are aiming for, that's what should be in your portfolio.

TASK, part 1

Think about portfolios, what you want, and how you could build a portfolio to help you achieve that.

Tell me what your aim is... and if/how you feel a portfolio could be related to your goal...

There's a wide variety of stuff out there related to portfolios.

I have a portfolio of my own, which is always under construction. I started redesigning a new one last year, and then I just decided I'd make a brand new one altogether; as such I haven't finished either. Here's the one I was redesigning (doesn't load if you're logged in with your school google account), and here's the new one I started creating.

We will look at more stuff related to portfolio later on this year again, for now, here's a few videos about portfolios in different fields. Some of them are related to using a portfolio to get a job, some are related to using the portfolio to get accepted to a university to study that field.

Choose just a couple to watch.

anim-port.mp4

Animation

prog-port.mp4

Programming

eng-port.mp4

Engineering

art-portfolio.mp4

Traditional Art

arch-port.mp4

Architecture

game-dev-port.mp4

Game Design

There's plenty of other career areas out there too that also use portfolios that aren't show here. Please feel free to look them up- sometimes you can find stuff for them, sometimes you can't. There are also a few industries what portfolios are still uncommon, so it can be hard to find resources sometimes.

I know an area that a good number of students are interested in not just game design, but also E-Sports/Esports (aka, playing video games competitively on a team). For the past few years, our Robotics team has attended the Global Conference for Education Robotics; it's part competition and part conference. One of the people I met there is part of the esports program at a university. I was able to chat with him a bit about what universities are looking for related to students interested in esports.

If you want to build a portfolio for Esports, consider adding:
- Do you play with a guild/clan/team/etc? (you probably should)
- Links to game streaming/recordings of streaming
- Links to commentary you've done on other streams
- Articles you've written related to Esports (matches, teams, game mechanics, patches/update analysis, etc).

Like everyone else, they want to see what skills you'd bring to their school and their teams.

But what about being "well-rounded"?
Students often worry about being well-rounded. If you're graduating from high school, and you did well in your classes, you're well rounded. If your portfolio and resume looks like you're doing everything, but you're telling a college/university/employer that you want to do a specific thing, then it doesn't look like you want to do that specific thing. Most of you day is already well-rounded because Texas requires you to take lots of different classes, focus using your outside of class time on the specific area you want to study/work.

There are different ways we can talk about showing you're well-rounded too, without looking like you have a lack of focus in your portfolio. We'll talk about this later on, but if you can't wait, you're welcome to talk with me about it early.

TASK, part 2

From one or more of the videos above, what thoughts do you have related to developing your own portfolio? Any specific ways that you could design a portfolio for what you're aiming for? What are your thoughts on how you might do this?

You also might be thinking that a portfolio is only relevant to specific industries, university programs, and jobs. While that is a component of it, there are a fair number of universities and university programs that require or suggest submitting a portfolio. Here's a video specifically about MIT's Maker Portfolio.

maker-portfolio.mp4

MIT isn't the only school where you can submit a portfolio, there's also:

These are just the ones I found this morning. There's probably more out there. As also mentioned, there are other sorts university programs that also allow submitting a portfolio. Almost all the arts and design programs expect it (like Brown, Stanford, London, and Otis College) , but there are others too:

Georgia Tech
Rice (Click on the School of Architecture or Humanities link)
University of Washington (in Washington)
USC School of Architecture
Western Washington

There are others too, these are just a handful I quickly found for our task for today. There's a good possibility that building a portfolio could help you for something you're interested in, whether that be for the job itself, interships, university programs, scholarships, etc.

TASK, part 3

If you didn't already have a portfolio from previous courses, then you were to start one earlier this year (we made it with Google Sites).

Have you really worked on your portfolio yet?
Think about what you want to do after high school. What career or industry do you want to work in? That should be the focus of your portfolio; you should be building a portfolio to help you get a job (or get accepted to a university/special program) related to that career/industry.

Think about what you might want to add, think about what content could help you. You may not have any yet, so you may want to start thinking about how you can use your time to do work / build skill for your portfolio.

Use your remaining class time to work on your portfolio. In your slides, add a screenshot of what you worked on and tell me about what you added.

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