A Lovely Achievement

Last night was the 4th Annual Next Talent Awards, in which students at The Art Institute of California – Sacramento are recognized for their outstanding work. Up until this year it was primarily a film festival for the film students with honorable mentions going out to the other departments. This year they decided to get all the departments equally involved and give out awards to each one.

For the Web Design & Interactive Media department there were 4 awards: Best Coding/Development Project, Most Innovative Project, Best Client Project Project, and Best Design. I submitted a couple of my projects for the different awards, hoping I’d win.

I’m proud to announce that I won the Best Design award for LovelyGeek.net!

What was even more exciting was that my friend and coworker, John Cremer, won the award for Most Innovative Project. He put together an awesome web site that utilizes HTML5 and a video-based background.

It was pretty neat to be able to come back after graduating and get some recognition for all of my hard work. Plus it was cool to have a friend win with me!

So how’s life after graduation?

It’s been almost two months since I’ve graduated, and one of the questions I’ve been getting from people is asking how life is. Well, in a nutshell, life is great.

To start with, I can’t tell you how much I love not having homework. Being able to come home from work everyday and know that in the back of my mind I don’t have some assignment or project to work on is a wonderful feeling.

I still get the Sunday night anxiety attacks, you know, the ones where you realize it’s Sunday and you haven’t gotten a darn thing accomplished over the weekend. Except then I realize, wait a minute, I have no school. 😀

Shortly after I graduated I started having dreams that I forgot to take a class or I had to go back to take one and was super unprepared. Luckily those dreams have subsided.

It still hasn’t fully sunken in yet that I don’t have to go back to school ever again (unless I want to), but I’m sure as time goes on the feeling will pass. 🙂