(Rebekah Bledsoe is a May graduate who received an AAS in Computer Simulation and Gaming from MATC. In addition to receiving hands-on experience in the classroom, she was able to receive real world experience through her involvement in the student gaming organization, Mothership. Rebekah shared some of those experiences with the MATC Times.)

I’ve worked on hosting/attending a few different events while acting as president of the club (Mothership). The larger events that we had this past year were the M-Dev Conference in Madison, the ESports summit in Milwaukee, the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee, and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. All of these events were centered around gaming and the game development industry, and they featured areas that we could network at. M-Dev is a conference similar to the Midwest Gaming Classic, but it featured speakers that were more centralized in the event compared to how MGC had them in separate halls.

I am particularly proud of how we were able to work hard to fundraise/request money from DSA (District Student Association) to get our six club officers (and two officers from Game Club) out to California for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC is one of, if not the, largest game development conferences in the nation.

We were able to learn a lot from speakers at this event, as well as network with many professionals at big studios. For example, I met and spoke with some department leads from Epic Games, Archetype entertainment, Riot, and even Ravensoft, and they had a lot of valuable feedback for my work and my goals.

We’ve had a few in-house events as well that are more casual for students and club members to attend, but we also were able to get a speaker at our Demo Day event that we met at M-Dev this year. The speaker is named Meghan Morgan Juinio, and she works at Santa Monica Studios, even working as the executive director of production for God of War: Ragnarok. She gave a lot of helpful information about how to get into the professional industry and flow with how it changes, but we also now have a connection with her to potentially call on in the future.

Overall, I’ve attended a few pretty amazing events outside of MATC to learn about the industry.