I chose Kent because of the Year in Industry scheme as I felt it was a great way to gain professional experience while also getting a break from my degree. Canterbury also seemed like a nice city when I first visited during an open-day.<\/p>\n
For my placement I worked for IBM at their Hursley campus. I chose IBM as they’ve been a staple name within the technology industry for so many years and they’ve had a lot of experience with placement students before, so I felt quite safe and in good hands going into my Year in Industry.<\/p>\n
I picked up a lot of new technologies that I had never used before, and got to work on developing my soft-skills in terms of working within a team among other things. As for how it has benefitted my degree, I feel that I am more capable at tackling assignments and I’ve got better at problem-solving – I also feel more confident in the work I produce! My placement helped me see what a positive and helpful team can look like within a professional setting and has made me want to strive even more to reach my goals within the technology industry.<\/p>\n
During my search for placements I got a lot of help from the placement office in polishing up my CV and got to do a lot of interview prep which definitely helped in landing my placement at IBM. Throughout the year I was regularly checked-in on by the placement office and knew that if I had any problems they were a phone call or email away.<\/p>\n
I worked in an Infrastructure and Release Engineering team, where the team’s focus is automating build-, test- and maintenance-processes. Some of the projects I worked on was creating an automated patching system that would regularly check our infrastructure for required patches and apply these, I also helped write a system to automate the application of vulnerability fixes and I also got to replace an old virus scanning tool used by the team with a new tool which required me integrate the new tool into their existing legacy codebase.<\/p>\n
If you want to get away from the city for a bit I recommend going for a walk down towards Chartham down through Westgate Gardens or exploring Blean Woods. If you want to do something more active, I highly recommend checking out Chimera Climbing in Wincheap, while you’re in the area check out Floc. Brewing. And lastly, for Canterbury’s best coffee head over to Fringe + Ginge Coffee – the staff are super friendly and best of all no laptops allowed, so you can really sit back and relax.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"