Porsche Amarr has been a member of EVE University for over two years, and wrote up a summary of his time, trying out multiple playstyles and campuses. Part one covers his time in the Amarr Mining Campus, and becoming a Freshman and then a Sophomore.

The following sets out my journey in Eve Uni since joining in January 2017. After two titan kills last night, I starting reflecting on how far I have come and how good Eve Uni has been all along the way:

PART ONE: Amarr Mining Campus

Mining
The mainstay of many new pilots, my first campus is/was AMC (not sure if we ever leave or just spend less time in a campus). I worked through a Venture, into a Procurer/Retriever and into a Skiff/Mackinaw and up from Mining Laser Is to Modulated Strip Miner IIs with crystals. Spent some time learning different ore types, reprocessing amounts and system security status – graduated from Veldspar and Scordite to Pyroxeres. Dabbled in a few missions.
After a short time in the uni, I applied for and received the Freshman title.

Classes/Fleets – HSC and NSC
Another essential part of learning Eve Uni is classes and fleets and between work and travel, I tried to attend as many classes and fleets as I could. The Mumble lectures, especially when combined with slide shows, wiki pages and practical sessions were helpful but I have nearly always found it essential to go and implement the knowledge and skills asap after each class to really learn/retain it.
It has always struck me, particularly in a game, how people will give their recreation time to prepare and run classes to the benefit of others and I have great respect for the Eve University Education Directorate and all those who get involved.
I realised early on from classes and fleets that, with a dodgy ping and a lack of affinity, solo PvP was not really going to be my thing. With little in the way of ISK, each ship loss was a heartbreaker.

Mining gets bigger
After some time mining, following another mainstay, I scaled up and two more mining accounts appeared. This was despite a few brushes with CODE and other gankers which sometimes caught me AFK or watching a movie and got my expensive mining ships. In highsec, losing Exhumers is an expensive business, even with three Exhumers going for hours at a time.
The AMC buyback service has always been fantastic and the increased scale of mining saw quite a few billion in buybacks over several months and some decent tax/profit margin.

Research
With ISK comes the quest for more ISK and I thought I’d try my hand at researching and inventing BPOs/BPCs. Without too much research (to be honest), I bought a whole lot of ship and equipment BPOs and started to lodge them in stations near AMC. I worked on lab skills to improve research and spent a reasonable of time popping into stations to build ME/TE on lots of BPOs. Having at least 15 and then 25 sets of BPOs being researched at a time seemed a logical way to make money but in itself just led to having lots of BPOs in stations.

Invention/Manufacturing
With a large and fairly regular supply of ore coming in from my main Eve gameplay in mining and a lot of time to think, I started contemplating actually using the materials for manufacturing instead of just selling to the Uni but first I needed to decide what to make. Without probably effective research, I decided to make Tech II drones. I started copying the drone BPOs but first shifted to build all the Tech I ship BPCs that I had collected from starter missions and elsewhere. At this point, I looked at the invention process and realised that additional materials would be required.

Exploration
Needing decryptors for invention led me to start exploration, initially in highsec and then very briefly in lowsec. I slowly started to train scanning, hacking and archaeology skills up and spent time in highsec getting hold of decryptors from data sites and some decent loot from relic sites. It was interesting work in highsec but a bit nerve-wracking after being instakilled on my first journey into lowsec and then settling on the odd wormhole daytripping.

Missions
As mining slowly began to drive me insane and exploration would periodically frazzle my nerves, I started looking further afield and messed around with some missioning. It had enough variety not to be too repetitive and was quite quick early on. Some security missions here and some courier missions there.

Station trading
Around this point, I decided to try my hand at station trading. I did a lot of reading about it and, like many things in Eve, I realised that it needed a reasonable amount of preparation to be a serious station trader. I was amassing some ISK from the mining operations and bits were trickling in from selling manufactured ships and explo but I needed to train up trade skills and work on my standings.
This is where the next main was born, as a dedicated station trader. With three toons mining on the screen, I spent quite a bit of time working the fourth through courier missions (no combat skills) to raise Caldari Navy and Caldari faction standings to decent levels. I trained Margin Trading to V and even Market Tycoon to V. For many months, I would have three toons out mining and one toon with 100 to 150 open trades at a time, sometimes playing the 0.01 ISK game and other times using some decent sites to identify reliable, high-volume trades. On some days, I would make a billion ISK from trading. On other days, I was trying to have a life – if triple-boxing miners was not driving me completely insane, 0.01 ISK trading threatened to – not complaining, it actually felt fantastic to be somehow in control of the game. Although, I was joining some fleets and classes but I was not really risking too much (or actually using any of the ISK that I was making). Periodically, I would make a silly mistake and get ganked during wartime on my main or on one of the alts but I was generally not losing any ISK anywhere.

Research
It was about that time, staring at lots of windows multiboxed on a screen that I discovered research agents and datacores. Without realising that the value is reasonably limited, it looked like free isk after an initial train, so I set my toons onto research training. At that point, there were also standings requirements which only suited one of my toons, so I checked on the most lucrative datacore returns and set off to make friends with research agents. To this date, they simply plug away giving research points each day and I should get organised and go and redeem the RPs for datacores to use/sell.
A bit disappointed by the lack of standings on my alts, I kept looking for other ways to make ISK as passively as possible as station trading was taking up a lot of my time but seemed far and away the most lucrative activity.

PI
I found Planetary Interaction (as it was then) and proceeded to skill into and set up 5 planets close to AMC. There was quite a bit of clicking involved but once each planet was set up, things became much easier. I had no idea what I would do with the products but they were being produced fairly passively – except for the time spent travelling to the planets from the trade hub to collect. These built up, as were the researched BPOs and some explo loot.

Service – Personnel Officer
After quite some time, maybe a year in the uni, I started looking at the Sophomore title. There was a suggestion that experience was one thing and then some service or giving back to the uni another. I had very little killboard to speak of and I had a few forum posts but I never felt in any sort of authoritative position to be giving advice to other unistas.
I saw an advert corp email for Personnel Officer positions and thought it would be worth giving it a go. I had performed that role in a work environment directly at one stage and then as a supervisor so while it wasn’t complicated in a game environment, I had a reasonable amount to learn. The application process was a little bit of a Catch-22 because Sophomore was preferred but it was going to be difficult to pick up Sophomore without some service. Thankfully, the Personnel Department accepted my application and I became a Personnel Officer.
For a number of months, I would monitor the chat channels, provide advice to potential applicants while scanning the queues, processing applications and running interviews. The personnel process itself, is not overly complicated, but I realised that I was not very (Eve) worldly. It took time to learn some of the cues to look for that might suggest an application was dodgy. I learnt about various corps and alliances, wardecs and diplomacy. Sophomore came early on.
The PO role was quite interesting and seemed to fit with my playstyle of mining and station trading as I could process applications and run interviews between trades while still having decent anti-gank vision of my miners. It was only when I went on a longer work trip that I was bumped off the list and the email said I would be welcomed back at any time but work hasn’t really slowed down much.

Part Two will cover Porsche’s experiences of the Wormhole campus and trying out more PVP. Look out for it soon.

If you want to follow in Porsche’s steps, apply to EVE University today.

This post is pulled from a forum post by Porsche Amarr. See the original post here (forum section accessible to EVE University members and alumni only)