Category: Internships, Placements and Jobs

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What to do the first week of your internship

When starting your internship, it’s important to make a good first impression and set yourself up for a good year. These are some things I wish I had known the first week of my internship to get the most out the experience. 

1. Get to know your role

It is important to know how your role fits into the company and what your responsibilities will be. It will help you meet and exceed your manager’s expectation and show that you are dependable and responsible. If not entirely clear from your job description, it’s perfectly okay to ask for clarification of what tasks are expected of you and the projects you will be working on. By learning what success looks like in your role, you are much more likely to achieve it and put forward your best work.

2. Start a ‘success’ document

Start creating a document for recording projects and tasks you have particularly enjoyed or succeeded at and how it impacted the company. It will help keep track of your achievements and can be used for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can be used when having check-ins with your manager, to show what tasks you have accomplished or how you have helped other team members. Alternatively, it could be used to reflect at the end of your internship, to demonstrate how you were successful in your role and how it has benefitted you and the company, to help gain a return offer. It could also be helpful for updating your CV after your internship or giving something to talk about during future interviews.

3. Introduce yourself to everyone

Try and get to know people during your first week. One way to remember everyone is by writing down their name and a brief description of their role after meeting them. People will appreciate you learning their name and it will help build friendships. It will also make it easier to initiate conversation in the future, such as when asking for guidance or advice, and help you to work better in a team.

Learning about peoples’ roles will help you learn more about the structure of the company and how it operates. By networking with others, you are more likely to be given the opportunity to work with other teams and gain new experiences and skills.

4. Learn the structure of your day

The first week of your placement is the perfect time to establish a good routine at work. To do this, learn how often to check-in with your manager, whether that should be daily or weekly, as well as other team members when collaborating. This will help you stay organised and better plan for these meetings.

As well as this, set up a routine for your own day for maximum productivity. This could be creating a list of daily objectives each morning, checking your emails at a certain times and using your most productive hours to complete more difficult tasks. This will help you stay focused and maximise your time.

5. Volunteer for projects

When possible, volunteer for projects at work. This will help you learn new skills and gain experience you might not otherwise get. It will show your enthusiasm for the role and your willingness to learn. You are also more likely to be remembered for future projects which could lead to more opportunities with the company. Your placement is what you make of it and you can get more experience by putting yourself out there and expressing what you want to do.

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My Review Of Otta

It can be extremely daunting when looking for a new job. I’m about to graduate this year in Computer Science and have spent hours scrolling through job posts online. So when I heard about this new recruitment platform, Otta, I was very intrigued.

It is a tech startup launched in 2020 that claims to ‘help you find your perfect job’ in tech. They have an extensive number of companies hiring on the platform, all of which have been vetted by the team at Otta. They say they only have the ‘most exciting, innovative and fast-moving companies’. ‘From startups to tech giants, you’ll find over 3,500 top companies and 70,000+ live jobs on Otta’.

According to Otta, they are more transparent about job opportunities than other recruitment platforms and include unbiased reviews, salary insights, diversity, and their honest take on every company.

The aim of the company is to help you be ‘picky’ and find your dream job. We tested it out to see if it was as good as it claimed to be.

Creating an account

Firstly, you have to create an account to view any job posts. To do this, you have to complete a quiz to assess the type of job you are looking for. This will allow Otta to only show you relevant job posts.

It asked questions such as what type of roles would you like to see, where would you like to work, when do you want to start, your preferred company size and your minimum expected salary.

Then it moved on to more tech-based questions, such as what industry you would like it work in, where you could select options such as AI, Security, eCommerce etc. As well as your favourite technologies to use, where you could select options such as Python, Java, AWS, SQL and many more.

I found it really useful that Otta asked these more technical questions, as most recruitment platforms, that are not tech-specific, do not include filters for these options. This seems like it will help you find roles that are more suited to your skills in tech as it is such a varying industry.

It was also just fun to complete this questionnaire and start thinking about exactly what you want to do as a career, rather than just choosing a position that is available.

View your roles

After creating an account, Otta showed me ten roles to swipe through that were suited to me from my questionnaire. You could either save or apply to any of these jobs and after going through the ten, could generate new results. It was easy to use and all of the roles interested me.

However, my favourite part was the description of each job. It included what the job involved, the company mission, insight into the company, company benefits, links to articles about the company and the people at the company. It was much more in-depth than on any other recruitment platform I have seen and allowed me to easily learn about the company I was applying for. I particularly liked the transparency of the description, including the salary benchmarks and statistics included by Otta such as growth rate and diversity. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, I really enjoyed using Otta. I believe it is perfect for people wanting to find graduate jobs or internships in tech. However, it is probably not as suitable for people in other industries. Overall, I found it a lot easier to use than traditional recruitment platforms and found relevant roles were much quicker to find.

My favourite part of the platform was the availability of information and the transparency for each job. It gave me more insight into each company and helped me better understand if I would be a suitable fit for a role. I hope this is something other recruitment platforms will do in the future.

I will definitely be using this platform again, alongside other tools, such as the NU Careers service and LinkedIn, to find my next job. Find the website here.

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Digital Edge Subsea – Video Software Engineer

Job Title: Video Software Engineer

Reports to: Engineering Manager

Location: Ulverston, Cumbria (Remote working possible)

Contract Type: Permanent Full Time

Salary: Competitive

Benefits: Private health insurance

Job Link: https://www.digitaledgesubsea.com/job-vancancies/video-software-engineer/

The Company

Located just to the south of The Lake District, Digital Edge Subsea is a world leader in digital video and inspection systems for offshore industries, such as renewables, decommissioning, oil and gas. With an enviable client list containing most of the major offshore companies, it is positioned to expand its capabilities and product portfolio to continue to drive forward the technology in this challenging sector.

The Role

A software engineer is required with the primary role of designing, maintaining and optimizing the video pipelines of the company’s products.

This job will suit an experienced software engineer or PhD student who is very familiar with video technology and software; particularly GStreamer, CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs. The ideal candidate will demonstrate specialized knowledge of streaming protocols, video formats and image process or machine vision techniques.

We need out engineers to be vertatile, enthusiastic to learn and keen to investigate new technologies. We also expect out software engineers to place a high emphasis on quality and reliability with a willingness and capability to test code.

Once a thorough understanding of the company’s products has been obtained, the Video Software Engineer will assist the technical support team with solving more advanced and unusual problems that they may face.

Essential Skills

  • C++
  • CUDA, GStreamer, OpenGL/Vulkan, OpenCV
  • Experience with video or camera technology

Desirable Skills

  • QT
  • SQL
  • Experience with profiling tools
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Tips for your placement year

Hi, I’m Maisie and I’m in my final year at Newcastle University studying computer science. Last year, I did my placement with Deep Secure, a cyber security company which provides cyber security defence products to businesses. I worked in the research team as a research assistant for the company. I will be returning to Deep Secure next year to work as a software engineer.

I learnt a lot during my internship and throughly enjoyed it. Below is a list of skills that helped me during my placement to get the most out of the experience. I hope this will be helpful if you are planning on doing a placement year.

Ask questions

One of the most important things I learnt during my internship was to ask questions. You are not expected to know everything and it is an invaluable opportunity to learn from others who have more experience than you. However, I found it is important to have done an appropriate amount of research before this, so you can ask more specific, purposeful questions. Asking questions was especially important when I was working independently, to help prevent feeling out of my depth. I did this by firstly asking for clarity if needed when given a new project proposal. This ensured I fully understood the requirements of the project. Then, at appropriate milestones, I made sure to ask for feedback from other team members to ensure I was reaching their expectations of what they wanted from the product. This helped me produce a more successful project.

Express what you projects you enjoy

Another thing I made sure to do when on my internship was to express what projects I had particularly enjoyed working on. This showed my enthusiasm for the role and I was then considered for similar projects which I also enjoyed. Similarly, I also expressed the skills I wanted to gain from my internship that aligned with my role in the company. For example, I was given the opportunity to give multiple presentations after expressing wanting to improve my communication skills. This helped me get the most out of my internship and learn new, different skills which I could not at university.

You don’t need to know everything

At the start of my internship, I was nervous that I might not know everything needed for my role. I would be using the programming language, Go, which was new to me. However, I did not need to be concerned, as my manager knew my starting level and aided me with my learning, by giving me projects gradually increasing in difficulty. I realised that the most important thing was just to get stuck into projects with enthusiasm, research was expected of me and I didn’t need to know everything initially. And of course, as before, it was perfectly okay to ask for help when needed. After a few weeks of my internship, I felt more comfortable in my role and had picked up most of the skills needed.

Be self-motivated

During my internship, I worked remotely, most of the time working on independent projects. Therefore self-motivation was very important skill for me to develop. I learnt to do this in a few ways. Firstly, I would set myself realistic daily objectives that I wanted to achieve. This helped me stay on track with project development and also helped with check-ins with my manager as I could easily show what I had accomplished and the progress that had been made to a project. Secondly, I tried to make the best use of my spare time and be proactive with tasks. Examples of this included updating older coding projects as my programming skills improved and researching different programming libraries which could be useful for upcoming projects. This way, I was able to show my manager I was able to take initiative and make the best use of my time.

Get to know the whole team

As I previously mentioned, I worked remotely during my internship. Therefore, getting to know all of my other team members was difficult. However, I tried to network with as many team members as possible. I met people on the sales team, the software engineering team, the research team and those in leadership. People in these different roles had different skills I could learn from and I was able to gain more experience. I was also able to learn more about the structure of the company and find out what departments I enjoyed. As well as this, it also just made my experience at the company more enjoyable and I am looking forward to going back.

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Placements with Unity