Category: Careers in Computing

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Placement Interview: Suryansh Singh, Andor Technology

Student name: Suryansh Singh 

Company name: Andor Technology (Under Oxford Instruments) 

Role: Software Engineering Placement Student 

Why did you decide to do a placement? 

There were two main reasons that led me to do a placement: I want to be job ready as soon as I graduate and having this placement experience will have help me significantly in that. 

My parents were able to finance the fees for my first two years at university. I want to use the salary from my placement to contribute to my final year of fees. 

What does your placement involve? What are your role responsibilities? 

My placement involves a wide range of tasks that a software engineer does. I am working with the main software development team, and my role is no different than the other developers. As an Intern I do need guidance sometimes, but the team are always on hand to help with any issues. 

I get assigned several tasks at the start of every sprint (a development run of 2 weeks) and then try to resolve all those tasks as quickly as possible. Once the development is done, I test my code on real devices in the lab – some of them are used by NASA and Nobel prize-winning scientists, etc. 

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

  • Start applying as soon as vacancies are open and apply to several placements to increase your chances, especially if you’re relying on the placement to finance your studies.  
  • Develop your computing CV through activities such as answering questions on Leetcode, increasing your proficiency in version control, and creating projects you can talk about at interview. 
  • Companies love hearing interns talk about AGILE methodologues and DevOps, so make sure to have a basic knowledge of them. 
  • Smile during your interview! 

You might get rejected during the application process, even from the online assessments but all you must do is learn from your mistakes, master these things, and move forward. I remember I got rejected from the first 20-30 applications I made but after a while I was clearing all the online assessments, had 3-4 interviews, and secured 2 offers. So, don’t let rejections demotivate you! 

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

Newcastle University has been very helpful in terms of career support. Before the placement I completed 3 or 4 NCL Internships offered by the university and that really made my CV and profile look good. The MyCareer website lists tons of internships and tools and there is the ability to book CV counselling. 

The support from the placement team through email has also been amazing. I emailed them with lots of questions and they dealt with all of them kindly. 

What benefits will your placement have on your studies? 

Before starting the placement, I was considering what my final year project would be. I was a bit concerned about what I would be able to create as I didn’t feel confident in my coding skills. But after completing the first 4 months of my placement, I now feel so much more confident in my skills. 

I’m feeling really motivated about going forward into my last year at university as I’ll be able to use everything I’ve learnt during my placement in my final year project and other assignments. 

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Employment on the UI and UA design of Foodiez a Mobile Food App

Job description: UI and UA design of wireframes for children mobile food app.

Start date: December 2022- March 2023, exact dates to be arranged. Trial of the food app prototype will be during 2023 school summer term. Further work will be required until launch of the food app autumn term 2023

No of hours: Approx 3-4hrs a week, hourly rates to be agreed.

Payment: by bank transfer for monthly invoice.

DBS checks might be required.

Location: remote location with Microsoft 365 SharePoint.

The mobile food app is intended for “Food, Learning &Wellbeing” a collaborative case study on tackling childhood obesity with Charlton Manor primary school www.charltonmanorprimary.co.uk

Background:

Charlton Manor developed and published Now We’re Cooking! Delivering the National Curriculum through Food, Ofsted approved/food based curriculum teaching children how to grow food, prepare and eat healthy meals.

These are few digital pages from the curriculum https://www.blurb.co.uk/books/7981527-now-we-re-cooking

The primary objective of the case study is to identify the causal impact of food based teaching on children eating behaviour (KS1and KS2/ 5-11yrs old). The mobile food app is intended for use by the children to keep a daily diary of food intake and physical activities, as part of their home work in the evening.

Currently we are preparing the wireframes for the food app and looking for assistance with the UI and UX design.

I welcome questions and look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes

Samira Salbi/Digital Editor

samira.salbi@thefoodiez.net

www.thefoodiez.net

+44 208 347 5302/+44772 993 3280

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An Interview with the Careers Service

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We interviewed Sara Williams about their role as Careers Consultant for Newcastle University and learn exactly what they do, and how that can be a big help to you. 

Sum up your role in 10 words or less 

I help/facilitate students to achieve their career goals.

What are the official responsibilities of your role? 

Official responsibilities include: 

  • Carrying out appointments with students either via our drop-in system,  
  • Pre-booked online or in-person and longer 1-hour appointments for career guidance and mock interviews 
  • Delivering some of our central workshops.  

I also work closely with the academics and Employability leads in the schools of Computing and Engineering to understand student requirements and plan a calendar of events.  

Being up to date with what’s happening in the jobs market and sectors that might be relevant to our student groups as well as more broadly with recruitment trends and assessment methods is also an important part of my role. 

What are the unofficial responsibilities of your role? 

Unofficially I get involved with a wider remit of what the career service does whether it be helping out on University Open Days or at Careers Fairs and hosting employer-led events. 

“Have things on your CV beyond academics”

What are the top three mistakes you find that students make when it comes to employability? 

Not mistakes necessarily, more learning points.  

  1. I think maybe underestimating the recruitment process and how many stages you might have to go through for some companies and perhaps not being prepared for that. 
  1. It’s tricky as not everyone can commit to it but, having things on your CV beyond your academics can be really useful, not only so you can showcase a broad range of skills to employers but also as a learning process for you to figure out what you are good at and what you enjoy. 
  1. And I think number three is that students can often feel the pressure to just jump in and start applying before they have taken a step back to try and understand what they might be looking for in their next job, and more broadly, their career. 

What employability resource do you think is most helpful for students? 

I think one of the challenges is that there is SO much information out there and so many resources. I might be biased but our website is really comprehensive and covers a wide range of employability topics from planning your careers to what to expect at assessment centres and what you can do to prepare. 

Here is a link to view all those resources:  https://www.ncl.ac.uk/careers/. 

“Learn as much about the assessment process you will go through as you can”

Where in the process of getting employed (applying, interviews, assessment centre, etc.) do you think students struggle with the most? And how can they overcome that difficulty? 

I think each of the assessment stages can come with its own challenges and people can struggle with different things.  I think the key bit of advice I would give here is for students to try and learn as much about the assessment process they will go through either via speaking to someone at the organisation, looking at their website or looking at sites like Glassdoor. Armed with that knowledge they can then use the multitude of resources via the careers service to help them prepare. If I was pushed for something more specific, I think interviews can be really challenging as sometimes students may not have ever had a formal interview before. There’s a lot of advice and guidance out there on interviews and I’d also encourage students to use careers appointments to practice answers or talk through answers with a consultant. 

How many students make use of the employability team? 

Oooo that’s a tough one as it can be hard to define how students use the Careers Service. As an example, we conducted about 8,400 appointments last year and roughly 4,000 students came to one of our workshops. Beyond that the Careers Service also looks after processing for on-campus job opportunities, hosting employer events like our careers fairs, our curriculum team runs and manages a careers module, our placement team manages around sending 150 students out on placement and our start-up team also supports students in terms of building their own businesses or if they want to operate as a freelancer… 

“Students can make use of the careers service 3 years post-study”

If there was one piece of advice you want students to take away from this interview, what would it be? 

Make use of the careers service!  

We’re here to support you through your time at Newcastle and beyond (students can access us for 3 years post-study) and we offer impartial advice and guidance on anything to do with careers. 

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Placement Insights from Matillion

Returning from a year in industry to complete their final year at Newcastle University, we interviewed Amy Jones about their time with Matillon. This is what they had to say:

Who did your industrial placement with? 

My placement was with Matillion which is a data transformation/cloud data warehouse provider. It’s based in Manchester but has offices in a few places around the world. 

What was your role? 

Security Engineer Placement Student. 

I worked in the IT and Security department across the Application Security and Cloud Security sub-functions.  

Why did you do a placement? 

I felt that getting some work experience under my belt would stand me in good stead when it came to applying for graduate positions because I would already know what to expect and I would be able to talk about what I’d done during interviews which hopefully would give me an advantage. Also, I felt that it would be easier for me to go into a graduate role if I had some time to get used to the work environment and already had a go at a security position while it was known to the company that I was still learning. 

When did you start applying and how many places did you apply for? 

I started applying at the start of the academic year and probably applied to 10 to 15 places. If I hadn’t heard back from Matillion in December, then I would have probably applied to more. 

How was the application experience? 

The application experience for Matillion was quite pain-free, you uploaded your CV and answered a couple of short essay questions and then after one interview with the CISO and GRC team lead, I was offered the position.  

However, a couple of others I applied for were a bit of a longer, more complicated process. I did a lot of assessments during the early stages of application processes that were meant to gauge your soft skills and how your brain works, I did some coding tests, and some had video interviews before real interviews. Each company will be different. 

What, if any, help did you get from the university when applying? 

I applied during a year we were fully online, so I didn’t have as much exposure to the help as in normal years, however, I did read up on the placement advice on the website. 

What work did you do over the course of your placement year? 

Since Matillion’s security team is still fairly small, I had the chance to do a lot of varied work and get dug in straight away. Most of my time was spent on application security looking at things like threat modelling, ASVS, and DAST solutions. I got to know Burp Suite and OWASP ZAP really well as I explored vulnerability scanning and exploits with them. I was responsible for daily and monthly cloud security checks which gave me exposure to AWS. Throughout my placement I was able to become Matillion certified, set up and run a CTF for our team of security champions, be a Women in Tech champion, run a charity bake sale that raised over 500 pounds across Denver and Altrincham and set up and organise our security guild. I even presented a guild session on TLS and PKI.  

How was the overall experience of doing a placement? 

I absolutely loved my placement, if you are considering doing a placement year, I would highly recommend it. It helped that I had an amazing company to work for and awesome co-workers and line manager, but wherever you end up I think a year in the industry actually trying your hand at what you’ll experience once your degree is done is a fantastic way to boost your skills and stand out amongst graduate applicants. It lessened my worries about going into employment after university and it has set me up with fantastic connections for when I finish. 

Would you like to go back to that company after your final year? 

I would definitely love to go back to Matillion at some point in my career, whether that’s when I graduate or later down the line after a few years in a graduate cyber security role, I’m not quite sure yet. I would strongly recommend Matillion to anyone looking for a tech role though, they’re an incredible company that cares about every staff member and they offer remote or in-person work. Hopefully, I will get to return to Matillion eventually.