The years of study and my placement year built up my skills from a ground level and enabled me to pursue this career.
What are your main responsibilities?
I take care of an internal platform, hosted on Adobe Experience Manager. This includes full-stack development (front-end UI/UX designs, client-side and server-side coding), as well as project management.
Please describe a typical day.
I would answer any administration queries directed to the Platform first. That includes creating and publishing pages, giving users permissions to access our system and assign a specific role inside it, as well as helping new users on-board their teams to our Platform.
Then, I take care of the backlog of my team. I check my own User Stories, as well as my teammates', to see where we are with our work. It's extremely important as we are all in different time zones, therefore we need to clearly document our work in case one of the engineers is out-of-hours.
After getting updates from everybody and making sure the completion is on track, I take care of my own assigned tasks, which typically include both coding and non-coding User Stories.
What is your greatest career achievement so far?
This is my third year at the company. I started as an intern, then carried on a part-time position throughout my final year of study, to later join back as a full-time employee. During this journey, I managed to earn several certificates and badges, including AWS Cloud Practitioner certification and Generative Artificial Intelligence Blue Belt Badge.
Thinking back to your degree, how do you think it prepared you for your current role?
Since I work in the industry tightly connected to my degree, without my university journey I wouldn't have even thought about applying for a software engineering role. During the first year, I learned how to program without any prior experience. Additionally, the years of study and my placement year built up my skills from a ground level and enabled me to pursue this career.
How did your placement year influence your career choice and do you think it helped you in your current role?
Yes - I did my placement at Cisco (my current company). Thanks to that, I managed to get a part-time, and then later full-time job and stay with the same team for a longer time. I feel comfortable enough in my daily job that I can take on additional challenging tasks, such as learning about different areas of IT.
Why did you choose to study at ºù«Ӱҵ?
It was both the university having a high standard of teaching, successful graduates in their fields of study, as well as the location itself - with its hills and parks, ºù«Ӱҵ is such a magical city to live in.
What were the best things about studying Computer Science in ºù«Ӱҵ?
The support from the teaching staff was the thing driving me forward. Whenever I had any questions about my course, degree, or even career, they would always help me out.
What did you like most about the city?
The parks and hills! I love going to the Peak District, but also to the parks in my area, especially the Botanical Gardens and Endcliffe Park. I definitely appreciate ºù«Ӱҵ more now that I have more time to wander and do bigger and smaller trips.
Where do you see yourself in the future?
I might do something more academia-connected, such as either transitioning to the research part of the industry or continuing my education by getting a Master's degree in the field of Computer Science.
If you could give advice to current students who are starting to think about their future career, what would you tell them?
It is really worth it to do a placement year, both for people who have and haven’t got prior experience with the industry. It allows you to try out a career for a year, make you understand what you like and dislike more, and have a study break before the final year.