This February–June semester was the first one in which I successfully passed 5 subjects in a while. I also did a 2-week trip to the UK in March, during which I visited some of my best friends and participated in a hackathon. The semester was spent studying from my parent's place, quite isolated, a bit depressing, which made me beg to myself "not again".
I also faced quite a bit of pressure when trying to get an internship for this summer: I had been wanting to get into Product Design for a while, so I wanted to get a Product Design gig and see how it felt working on that. However, my portfolio is lacking, I would say. Ideally, a strong portfolio has a few strong case studies of a product design, showing the whole process, method, decisions and rationale behind them. I have none of that:
So, even though I've read about process, how to perform interviews, etc. I'm lacking formal user research, validation, etc. I mostly build simple things for myself, for fun, and I haven't actually tried to build a product and sell it. This would be an important growth opportunity, which would boost my motivation/reasons to take on some ideas I have for projects.
Being too busy during the semester, I reached summer without having a proper portfolio. My idea was to take some of the things I've done, and write about them, focusing on the process and aspects related to product design. In the end, I had a website with a few highlights and no case studies, just a small piece of writing.
However, despite the lack of a portfolio, I got contacted by a mutual Product Designer on twitter who runs his own design consultancy, to whom "[my] approach to design, development, and art always draw[ed his] attention". I ended up joining the consultancy as a product designer a few months later, as a part-timer, while continuing my degree.
After the Feb-June semester, I spent an intensive week giving two rounds of the sixth edition of my Multiplayer Online Game Development course. I also ran ads, for the first time! It was for the course. One week before it. Got many people interested, which would have made the ads a great investment. However, through interaction with people who had demonstrated interest (via liking/rting the ad), I discovered that the schedule for the course was not realistic for people with 9-5 jobs, and that for years we (the videogame development club) had been turning the eye on this audience. The insight I got through running ads was very valuable, and had forgotten about it until writting this.