Category: Undergraduates

Posted on

Placement year at Baker Hughes, Cramlington

Baker Hughes, who have taken our students for a number of years have an open internship at their Cramlington office (this is in South-East Northumberland and is not that far from Newcastle).

The link for candidates to apply is :

https://careers.bakerhughes.com/global/en/job/R68285/12-month-University-Placement-and-Graduate-Internship-Opportunities-UK-Digital-Technology-2023 The headline location is Aberdeen, but the text refers to positions across the UK. The intern would be involved in cloud-based application development on AWS using a variety of technologies – it would be a continuation of the project on of our current placement students there has been working on.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Gaining experience for your CV

Finding an internship with no experience can be tricky, especially when applying to a big company. However, there are ways in which you can improve your CV at university without any prior experience and gain skills employers are looking for. 

Join a society

Joining a society can help develop many relevant skills for the workplace. Attending a career-based society will show your interest in the field beyond what you are learning on your course. It could also help you further develop your technical skills through different events such as Hackathons and Capture the Flags, which can also be written on your CV. Alternatively, applying for a role on a society committee will demonstrate leadership and organisational skills.

However, joining any society which you are interested in will demonstrate that you are a well-rounded individual and will help employers determine if you’d be the right fit for the company.

NUSU has two computer science related societies, Cyber Society and the Computing And Technology Society which are definitely worth joining if you haven’t already.

Virtual experience

Another way to gain experience is with virtual internships. Many big companies have courses which you can enrol on for free, including J.P.Morgan, Accenture and Visa. This will be advantageous if you decide to apply for internships at these companies, as you will have already demonstrated that you have the relevant skills they are looking for. It will also give a talking point in interviews and show you have taken initiative to learn more about the company.

Forage has an extensive catalog of virtual internships you can apply for. You can find out more from this blog post here.

Alternatively, Bright Network also has a virtual internship experience each year and many other events throughout the year with many big employees joining to give advice and network with. You can find them here.

They also have a list of employer-led career events which is worth checking frequently. You can find them here.

Volunteer

Volunteering is an opportunity to do good for your community whilst also gaining different experiences that you wouldn’t at university. It will demonstrate you have skills such as teamwork, communication, and self-motivation. You could volunteer in your field of study, using your technical skills to help others. This will show employers that you are passionate about your degree and want to expand your knowledge further. You will also have the opportunity to meet and network with other people in your local community with similar interests.

NUSU has plenty of different volunteering positions including technology-based roles, such as working as a STEM ambassador for the Altitude Foundation.

Create your own project

If you’re trying to show certain technical skills on your CV but aren’t sure how, you could create your own programming project to demonstrate these. This could be based on something you had learnt about at university and wanted to learn about further. Alternatively, this could be based on your interests outside of university. For example, producing a project to solve a problem. Either way, it helps an employer see what you are passionate about and shows interest beyond university study. These can be kept in a programming portfolio on Github to show your employer via a link.

Posted on

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.