Work experience during your undergraduate Computer Science degree can take the form of a 9-12 month placement taken between stage 2 and 3. This provides the opportunity to gain real-world experience, develop your technical and inter-personal skills and enhance your career prospects: many students who have taken a placement end up with a graduate job offer from the same company, and the most recent graduate employment figures show 100% of graduates who had done a placement are employed in a graduate-level job (or in further study) 6 months after graduating.
If you plan to do a placement as part of your degree:
- You will need to be on the correct degree course (for example, G401 BSc Computer Science with Industrial Placement, G421 BSc Computer Science (Mobile and Distributed Systems) with Industrial Placement, etc.
- If you are not yet on that programme, you will need to complete a Degree Programme Change form, available from CS Reception, to be signed by the Degree Programme Director. But you don’t need to do this until after you have secured a placement – there’s no need to rush into doing it until then.
- You are responsible for finding, and applying for, the placement. You can get help from the School, by looking at the information provided on these pages, by talking to the Placements Co-ordinator (Steve Riddle) and signing up for alerts from the Careers Service (Vacancies Online) as well as making full use of all the resources (a list and guidance can be found here).
- Once you’ve secured a placement, you must complete a Placement Approval Form, to be signed by the Placements Co-ordinator and the Degree Programme Director.
- Once you have started your placement, we will enrol you in a community on e-portfolio where you can share your experience with other students on placements. A member of academic staff will also come out to visit you.
- During your placement you’ll also need to complete some short assignments and a Report Form giving updated contact details and more information about your work to date, and a Learning Agreement recording the initial objectives as discussed and agreed with your employer.
Further information about placements can be found: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/careers/workexperience/placements/