Seeing others where I began

It's been an interesting past couple of days, on a last minute cancellation I found myself on a bus to Boston on Tuesday night to attend the CIMIT conference. This was a pretty great trip, granted it was only for a day it felt a little bit like a vacation. Our demonstration went well, it was truly heart warming to see a lot of the things I had worked on functional and working in front of a crowd. I forget sometimes how fun it can be networking and interacting with the crowd as well, and how second nature it's become. It's sort of funny now that there has started to be familiar faces at these conferences, one in particular is John Able. I've grown used to seeing him on my travels and it's sort of neat to get into a good conversation with him. He really gave our prototype a critical eye and I think we survived haha...

What I really want to write about in this blog post is actually about the people working there ironically. The group that went down to CIMIT was just phenomenal and beyond any sort of camaraderie we all had during the trip, they were just great at interacting with people as they passed by. I was truly impressed with some of their networking skills and their ability to draw them into games like Spore and Trauma Center. It was also really great to see and hear from Ann and how the team in Learning 2008 was doing. I feel a bit awkward talking about the team in this light but I feel so proud of them. Hearing about Elliot Masie's new challenges for them and their experience in general is just so cool. It's sort of come full circle... A year ago I was in that place, a year ago on the plane ride back I was hoping that this ride wouldn't end, and so much has happened in that year. I know an experience like what we do at the Learning conferences is a bit changing, and I can't help but wonder if in a year from now this team will feel as I do today and be proud of what the next team has accomplished. I feel awkward saying proud, it implies some sort of ownership I think so maybe it's not quite the right word... but in any case it's pretty awesome. Seeing how much we've grown this past year, how far we've begun to push our boundaries, and wondering what will happen in the rest of this year; makes me sad that there's an end in sight. In that respect I know all good things must come to and end, and that I must move on but I can't help but feel like the Emergent Media Center has become much more then a place of work but also a bit of a family. It's nice to feel like I belong, I haven't always felt that in life. It's going to be mixed feelings for me when I graduate, but I'm even more excited to see how the EMC will progress... and be proud knowing that I was there to help it take some of it's first steps.