Students That Freelance

What is your major (if in college), college/university/school, city/state/country/etc, and what do you do in your freelancing?

Right now I’m attending Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia trying to get a degree in Computer Sciences. I’m a part time freelancer and currently hold a job with a company called Vancast Investments as a systems administrator. Vancast is an umbrella company that covers two other companies called “Art Knapp” and “Way to Grow”. Both companies are focused around home and garden products and retail. On my website you can see that a lot of my work has been done for Vancast’s child companies; Art Knapp’s retail site, artknappsurrey.com, was built by me under ThinkTank Design. I’ve constructed also handful of PHP applications for Vancast as well. Applications like Automailer, a program that makes mailing lists and sends mail to everyone on those lists at a set time and date, and Xitem an inventory system that interfaces with the point of purchase systems in the Art Knapp building. Both of those Applications will be going public soon under an open source license. When I’m not running around at work, I’m trying to establish ThinkTank Design’s brand so I can collect some more clients as currently I only have a hand full.

How long have you been freelancing and what made you start freelancing as a student?

I started playing with html when I was about 7 years old. Back then it didn’t mean much to me, It was just amusing; sticking pictures of cartoon characters all over my parents web browser with the tag. It wasn’t till about ten years later that I started to really look at web development as something I wanted to do as a career. Previously I wanted to be an architect but that changed after I realized that I would have to spend years drawing I-beams for a corporation that didn’t care about my artistic talent. Just after graduating from high school I worked for my uncle, Mike Sjokvist, during the summer as an extra hand around the office. My uncle Mike owns Splatter Graphics and is a freelance web designer. After the summer my outlook changed. I decided I wanted to take of freelancing myself was because of the experiences had while working at Splatter Graphics. Then there was still the fact I didn’t see a future as an architect anymore.

What are some of the best parts about being a student freelancer?

I can still live at home and not feel bad about it…? Lol just kidding. I’d have to say that if anything freelancing is hard to do while being a student, at least for me. I also work a Job 4 days a week 9am – 5:30pm so finding time to get things done usually extends into the wee hours of the morning (kinda like right now haha, its 2:27am). I do love learning though, so being a student seems to keep my brain well fed.

What are some of the challenges you have found being a student freelancer?

Other than not having time to sleep, I’d have to say finding time for my friends and love ones is a challenge as well. People are very important to me as I’m a very social person. I need to interact with people to prevent myself from turning into a strange geek that mumbles source code to himself. Lol, all kidding aside, I love what I do, it just literally consumes my life.

Where do you hope your freelancing career will take you in the future?

As soon as I’m done with my degree and I’ve got some savings to play with I’d like to buy a nice condo in the downtown core of Vancouver. I’d scale up ThinkTank Design and open an office to work out of, as well as fill it with some talented people to work with. Other than that I’m pretty easy to please. So long as I keep producing work that makes me, and others happy then I will be happy as well.

Where can our readers see your work and read more about you?

Well a good place to start would be thinktankdesign.ca; my site. I’m on twitter as @RobertWHurst and FreelanceSwitch under the same username. I’m also on Facebook and if I like you I might even add you as a friend. Other than that I’m not really sure. I’m not very established yet so I’m still pretty obscure, by I’m still very new in the web developer community. I’ve just turned 20 this January so I’ve got some years ahead to polish my skills still.

Want to be featured? If you want all the fame, please feel free to email us with the subject “I want to be interviewed!” We plan to feature one student freelancer a week.