| I also play LoL, although I've given it up for Lent, and used to run the server's leading raid guild in WoW back in the day. So I hear where you're coming from. Congrats on your accomplishments. None of the following is meant to lessen them. When I was young and impressionable, it struck me as absolutely freaking magic that you could make whole hundreds of dollars appear out of the Internet without doing "real work" with an office and tie and deadlines and all those things that sounded a lot like my least favorite parts of school. Being older and wiser, I now realize that hundreds of dollars is rat spit next to the going market rates for engineers, and there exist plenty of options to get compensated in 2014 for things which are much closer to LoL than they are to office/tie/TPS reports. I also hear you with regards to the social issues. I lost a lot of friends, including some of the people who probably knew me best, when I quit playing WoW. We made the usual non-specific promises for hanging out later. It never happened. I eventually made new friends, some on the Internet (waves) and some off. I'd suggest simply titrating down on your LoL play per week (cap it to, say, 12 hours a week to start [+]) while you start getting ready for Adulthood (TM). Also, although it's sort of tangential to the LoL issue, you may not be accurately apprised of the current state of the hiring market for engineers as a college student. God knows I wasn't. Here it is: it is absolutely on fire right now. You know how you've been in a cutthroat meritocratic competition for essentially every gate you've ever passed through in life up until now? Your next gate is going to be people bidding against each other to give you six figures in starting salary and a signing bonus larger than your career earnings in LoL. (Those are Valley numbers -- it isn't quite so white hot in every geographic area, but it's still a seller's market rather than a buyer's market.) Bonus points: It's quite possible that you've learned enough about marketing over the Internet to be dangerous during your streaming career. The returns for having hundreds of thousands of people following you and moving them through multiple types of conversions are, for LoL streamers, not high numbers. Many of those same skills can be cross-applied to selling e.g. business to business software. B2B software is substantially more lucrative. [+] Guesstimate of current play time arrived at by years of experience rather than by latent contempt for videogaming. It's, um, "more than 12 hours a week." |
When you're in a computer degree, you're surrounded by people who know computers, they're comfortable with them, and know the basics. You may joke about your granny not knowing how to hook up her printer and all that.
When you get into business world, you'll come across people with Serious Responsbilities™ and Real Jobs™ in Positions of Authority™ who won't know what a zip file is. Or will ask you how long it'll take to sort that large list of numbers ("ummm.... command line?").
Once you get out of the geek bubble, you'll realise you have a magic superpower to make the magic computer boxes do magic.
(Like patio11, I was young and ignorant in college once)