SINGAPORE: Even as the DigiPen Institute of Technology gets set for its first intake of students here come September, two Singaporeans have already achieved what some consider the holy grail of a gaming education: Coveted places at the Harvard of gaming and animation schools in the United States.

Mr Kenji Low, 25, a third-year student in the Real-Time Interactive Simulation (RTIS) degree course, holds the bragging rights as the first Singaporean to be enrolled at DigiPen.

Victoria Junior College alum Melanie Chin, 20, who has just finished her first-year at DigiPen, is its first female Singaporean student — and a double rarity in that just 9 percent of the student population there is female.

It's easy to see why competition to get into DigiPen is so tough — last year's fall intake was just 900 — and why there is such a buzz over the school launching its first and only campus outside the United States, at Singapore’s Fusionopolis.

DigiPen students are often offered jobs even before they graduate. And Mr Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet US — the studio behind Guildwars, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game — told TODAY it had 20 DigiPen graduates making up 40 percent of its staff.

"They are among our most talented and capable developers", ready for game development challenges from day one, he said.

But any would-be enrollees who think that things get easier once they secure a place at DigiPen should think again.

The programme is so rigorous that many students burn out. Mr Low, a Ngee Ann Polytechnic mechatronics engineering graduate, had his rough patches.

"The first year was pretty easy. It wasn't until the second year that I started pulling my hair out; there was a constant flood of work and responsibility that I hadn't prepared for. I was staying in school from 9am until midnight for weeks — by the end, I was so burnt out I had to take a semester off," he said.

"If I had not had my friends around to help each other out, I would probably be out of DigiPen by now."

This is a fair foretaste of what students at the upcoming DigiPen Singapore campus might also expect. But the slog could be well worth the results.

Director of admissions Ms Linnea Mobrand said companies here are already expressing interest in hiring DigiPen Singapore interns.

Mr Alex Loo of 10tacle studio was hopeful DigiPen's entrance would raise the standards of training programmes here. "Its presence would be a veritable boon to our industry," he said.

Citing DigiPen graduates such as Kim Swift — who has gone on to become a name in the gaming world following her work on the game Portal, which started out as a student project — Mr Loo said DigiPen students would be highly sought-after upon graduation.

The Singapore campus, which will take in 70 or so students initially, will offer both a Bachelor of Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Production Animation.

About 60 applications have come in and the school has fielded about 400 enquiries. According to Ms Mobrand, about 20 percent of students will likely come from overseas.

Some 10,000 new jobs in interactive and digital media (IDM) are expected to be created here by 2015, with the Media Development Authority aiming to turn Singapore into a global IDM capital.

The launch of the CGOverdrive conference on Tuesday — held alongside CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia 2008 — will see well-known video game developers such as Codemasters and Ubisoft recruiting to make headway into the region. Ubisoft, for instance, has revealed it aims to sign up to 300 people for its local office.

Having done his research before enrolling, Mr Low believes that if video games programming is what one wants to pursue, "DigiPen is the way to go" because of its "extremely solid curriculum aimed at producing the best graduates for the video games industry".

Applications are open for DigiPen Singapore’s September intake. The school's next information session, where you can find out more about its programmes, is on June 26, 7pm. Call 6577 1900 or email singapore@digipen.edu for more details.


- TODAY/so