Games Industry employability seminars

Please see below for details of upcoming seminars from the UK Games Industry taking place in the Urban Science Building. Talks are free and open to all students.

Industry talks will start at 13:00 for around 40 minutes, with informal chats and feedback in the Game Lab (4:015) afterwards. Please be punctual and do not take photos.

More talks to be announced.

NCL Internships

NCL Internships are open to all current Newcastle University students and provide a unique opportunity to gain valuable graduate level work experience alongside your course.

Opportunities are advertised throughout the year and you find all current vacancies on My Career by searching ‘NCL Internship’

The following NCL Internships are advertising on MyCareer right now:

Role title, company name: Sports Social Impact Data Intern, Newcastle Rugby Foundation

Student requirements: This internship is open to all Newcastle University students.

Closing date: 03/02/2025

Dates and times: This internship will take place for 50 hours between March and July 2025. You will undertake on average 4 hours per week, with hours flexible around your course. The internship will take place both at business premises and remotely.

Bursary/wage: £625 Bursary

Role overview: Newcastle Rugby Foundation needs to ensure we have a robust strategy to collect and interpret the data we collect from our participants to enable us to effectively evaluate our community programmes. We would like to improve our Theory of Change and ensure we are working effectively to achieve the goals, outcomes and challenges we are trying to address in our activities. We would like to learn further from evidence to inform improvements in activity design, implementation and management, and facilitate clarity in our vision for the future.

For more information and to apply, click on this link https://mycareer.ncl.ac.uk/leap/jobs.html?id=82132&service=Careers%20Service

Role title, company name: Child Language Transcriber Intern, Newcastle University

Student requirements: This internship is open to all Stage 2 and 3 Newcastle University students but would be most suited to those studying Linguistics/English Language, Speech Therapy, Psychology, or Computer Science.

Closing date: 31/01/2025

Dates and times: This internship is expected to be for a total of 94 hours. You will work up to 10 hours per week between February and June 2025. Working days and times are flexible.

Bursary/wage: £14.29 per hour including holiday pay

Role overview: The candidates will require knowledge of child development, preferably child language development, to transcribe recordings of an English-acquiring child, collected during COVID, for research purposes. The candidates will need to carefully transcribe audio recordings of child and parent speech orthographically (using English spelling conventions) according to CLAN conventions (to be taught on the job).

For more information and to apply, click on this link https://mycareer.ncl.ac.uk/leap/jobs.html?id=82358&service=Careers%20Service

Get in touch with us

If you have any queries regarding careers and employment, big or small, no matter what stage you’re at, you can get advice by submitting your query via MyCareer. You can also find details of all the internships we’re currently advertising on MyCareer by clicking on Vacancies; Search Vacancies and then typing NCL Internship into the Quick Search box.

Please visit www.ncl.ac.uk/careers to explore all we offer!

NCL Internships

NCL Internships are open to all current Newcastle University students and provide a unique opportunity to gain valuable graduate level work experience alongside your course.

Opportunities are advertised throughout the year and you find all current vacancies on My Career by searching ‘NCL Internship’

The following NCL Internships are advertising on MyCareer right now:

Role title: Student Developer, Newcastle University

Student requirements: This internship is open to all Masters and PhD students at Newcastle University.

Closing date: 27/01/2025

Dates and times: This internship is expected to be for a total of 198 hours. You will work approximately 20 hours per week between February and June 2025. Working days and times are flexible. Work will take place both on campus and remotely.

Bursary/wage: £14.29 per hour including holiday pay

Role overview: This internship includes researching in Inclusive Computer Science. The attainment gap is a known issue in Higher Education for those from diverse backgrounds and we want to better understand based on assessment marks where this gap is occurring. The aim of this role is to analyse an existing data set and to assist in further data gathering through focus groups and surveys.

For more information and to apply, click on this link: https://mycareer.ncl.ac.uk/leap/jobs.html?id=81892&service=Careers%20Service

Get in touch with us

If you have any queries regarding careers and employment, big or small, no matter what stage you’re at, you can get advice by submitting your query via MyCareer. You can also find details of all the internships we’re currently advertising on MyCareer by clicking on Vacancies; Search Vacancies and then typing NCL Internship into the Quick Search box.

Please visit www.ncl.ac.uk/careers to explore all we offer!

Placement Interview: Roisin Webb, Primark

Student name: Róisín Webb 

Company: Primark  

Role: Technology Trainee Digital Architecture – Cloud Security  

Why did you decide to do a placement? 

There were a few reasons I decided to do a placement. In particular, I wanted to gain industry experience and learn more about the opportunities I could get into after university. A placement year was the perfect way to gain a year’s experience to enhance my CV, and it was an added bonus to get paid. 

The placement also helped me develop my technical and personal skills, including presenting, time management and communication. 

What did your placement involve? What were your role responsibilities? 

One of my key responsibilities was to regularly check the progress of the compliance of Primark’s ‘Security Baseline’ initiative. This involved working with an external company to make 2 to 5 policies compliant per sprint. I worked on improving the compliance score on Secure Score (Microsoft Defender for Cloud) to provide the required business risk reduction assurance. From December 2023 to July 2024, the score improved by 14%, which involved regular meetings (which helped improve my confidence as I lead these meetings) give guidance on remediation tasks and provide work packages. 

I gained experience of monitoring through the Azure platform, and it was my obligation to ask for updates and push deadlines in our Stand Ups. As the representative for Primark, the responsibility was significant, and I was the first point of contact for the third-party partner to raise any issues or problems. 

I produced a Low-Level Infrastructure Document, which taught me a range of technical skills, as I got to see real configurations being implemented. I also learned business skills by reaching out to colleagues for peer reviews and approvals. 

I created a Security Operations landing zone in Azure, which involved reaching out to different colleagues, presenting to them, and improving my Visio skills and knowledge of Azure Services. The creation of the landing zone also helped develop my project management skills, as I drafted a project plan for implementation. Using the Azure Pricing Calculator was very insightful for gaining knowledge about the pricing side of implementing services. 

Do you have any advice to students who are looking for / applying for a placement? 

  • You don’t need to know everything going into the year – the company are there to teach you but also learn from you. 
  • Don’t apply to loads of places for the sake of it: apply to what you’re interested in and tailor your CV to the role and the company. 
  • During your placement, be curious, ask questions and don’t be afraid to ask for help. 
  • Make use of the university’s careers service. You can get your CV checked, do practice assessments and practice with a mock interview. 

When did you start applying? How many placements did you apply for? 

I started applying in October 2022. I was quite lucky as I got the first placement I applied for. 

What support did you have from the university before and during your placement? 

During my placement, there was constant support if you needed it; my placement supervisor kept in touch with my by email and even visited me in Dublin to see how I was getting on and what I had achieved, as well as speaking to my manager about my progress. 

How do you think your placement will benefit your final Undergraduate year and future career? 

It taught me what I definitely don’t want to do, but also what I do want to do in the future! I now know I have a passion for cloud and cyber security, and this has helped to know what graduate jobs and schemes to apply for. It helped me develop both personally and professionally, and I will be able to use the skills I learnt during my placement year in the future, no matter the company I work for. 

As for my final year, my placement helped me to choose which modules I want to do and informed my ideas for my dissertation topic.