Well I know for sure that Dundalk doesn’t send it’s 3rd years out into the field for some EXTREAMLY valuable work experience. I’m after completing the course there last June and we didn’t get a shred of IT experience at all!
With regards to DARE, Dundalk really pushed for it’s students to apply and enter. Since the games dev course started in Dundalk in ’05 we’ve been entering our game ideas to DARE. So on that point I would have to congratulate Dundalk on pushing it’s students to enter. They were successful with 2 teams from the college getting into the DARE competition 2 years in a row.
We had a module in 4th year called Entreprenship that thought us how to go about getting funding and such, to set up our own companies. It wasn’t a huge module but did give us the basics to marketing our idea’s and trying to sell our designs and get companies set up.
I totally agree with your last point. However I dont think it should just be 3rd years. I think its should be, and more importantly, 4th years trying to develop a game that they can market!! At the end of the day, they are the ones out the door the following September. Because of my lack of experience in IT, game dev, web dev, etc. I’ve been forced to leave Ireland in search of work. Every company in Ireland are looking for candidates with x amount of years experience and for us graduates that don’t have 2 seconds worth of industry experience, it’s a total nightmare. So I totally agree with you that colleges that provide a games dev course should totally have a 3rd year work experience module, so that their students aren’t leaving college totally unexperienced!