K. So the other day day i was thinking about job possibillities and i thought of this one. a disney imagenear thiks up all the rides. its basically a disney engeneer preety cool huh but heres the best part its a real job!  :coolsmile:

why1california - 30 August 2008 10:02 AM

K. So the other day day i was thinking about job possibillities and i thought of this one. a disney imagenear thiks up all the rides. its basically a disney engeneer preety cool huh but heres the best part its a real job!  :coolsmile:

I think it would be an awesome job.  My sister worked for Disney (still does technically) as an animal keeper.  Disney is a great a company to work for.  My sister took a job at another zoo in another state so she can get management experience and hopefully go back to Disney.  In the mean time they (Disney) are keeping her as an employee.  She goes back once a year for a day and keeps things like her seniority.

As you might have guessed I am really impressed with Disney as a company and I thinking being an engineer for them would be wonderful.

Being an Imagineer was always a dream of mine - I’m a huge theme park geek and love the Disney parks! I was actually lucky enough to intern at Walt Disney World for a summer as an interface designer, and during that time my boss sent me to work with a small team of Imagineers for a month. I was the only girl, but it was like having 7 really smart dads who were willing to teach me whatever I wanted to learn. And I got to help prototype the Photopass system, which they’re using in the parks today!

Alas, shortly after I left the whole team got laid off. After the whole Disney Decade they’ve been outsourcing more of their design work, and it’s harder and harder to find Imagineering jobs out there. But they’re not the only game in town! There are a number of independent companies that specialize in location-based entertainment and theme park design, and Disney actually works with some of them. So that might be another way at getting at your dream. There are also teams at Disney that aren’t called Imagineers but do AWESOME stuff for the parks, like the DS park guide they played with a while back. If your passion is theme parks, definitely do lots of research into the types of jobs people have, and chase that dream down! :)

Becoming a Disney Imagineer is possibly one of the hardest jobs in the world to acquire, which makes it both daunting and promising. I think it would be pretty cool, but I also think Disney has been associated with some shady actions in the past, and I wouldn’t want to inadvertently be associated with something of that nature, though I imagine this is a non-issue nowadays.

I will say that anybody who has not seen Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, you absolutely must. He’s one of my idols and his speech is more motivational than most any I’ve heard from a professor. It’s a long video, but you’ll find it rewarding and it does cover some of the intricacies of being an Imagineer.

It’s really great to hear that Randy’s talk had such an impact on you! Ironically, Randy was the one who connected me with that job at Disney that I mentioned earlier in this post. I was a student in his Building Virtual Worlds class at the the time, and I was one of his TAs for the class during the fall of 2002. I was actually at his “last lecture” - at the time it was just a personal journey, I had no idea what a phenomenon it would become. But again and again I hear about his impact on people who never even knew him, and I am just so glad others got to benefit from his passion for following one’s dreams.

Randy had a huge direct impact on my life—he was one of the reasons I chose to attend Carnegie Mellon, because I saw his talk about the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and it was the first time I had ever heard about the discipline that is now my career. And then near the end of his talk he mentioned his time with Imagineering, and I knew I had to meet him! I just didn’t know at the time that he would quite literally help me achieve one of my biggest childhood dreams, if only for a few months. Randy’s confidence in me changed my life for the better, and I feel especially blessed to have been able to know him and learn from him personally.

If you ever want to talk about that talk or Randy’s work, just PM me. :) I hope you are chasing your dreams too!

Wow, awesome. I wish I could have been there for it; I’m a big fan of any and all inspirational material, I make a point to collect links to various videos, audio, etc. that I think people could benefit from and then distribute when beneficial. I actually wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon but I had a little more fun than the average high schooler and had to make up for it with hard work later. I actually haven’t graduated yet, but I’m definitely acquiring my dreams; my job relocated me to a beautiful place, I’m working on a bit of my own research and hopefully I’ll get a better (more credible) degree after I transfer to a school in this area and one day I’ll be a professor making my best effort to enrich the lives of the next generation. I think you’ll probably be receiving a PM from me some time today :) and I think he’d be proud that you’re so willing to share the blessings he strived to promulgate.