Alexia Ambrus is a current Computer Science student at King’s College London. In this entry of Global Placement Stories, Alexia Ambrus talks about what she does on placement, and the lessons she’s gained from it.
Why did you want to do a Placement?
The main reason I wanted to do a placement year was to have a hands-on experience in the tech industry, explore my career options and network as much as possible with people with experience in this domain.
What do you/your team at the company do? What is most exciting about working there?
I’m currently working as a Scala Developer for Bank of America. My team is part of the Settlements Domain and we’re working on developing high volume, low latency software applications used within our domain in the Back Office. What I enjoy most about working for BofA is the breadth of knowledge you get just after several months and how diverse the work we’re doing is. My team is also another reason why I’ve been enjoying my work so much as I’ve been extremely lucky to have a really supportive team, buddy and line manager.
What’s the environment and workspace like? Working hours? Any nice perks?
Usually, I split my time between the main offices in Central London and in Bromley or work from home, depending where my team is based that week. I try to go in as much as possible as the atmosphere in the office is always very friendly and relaxing. I usually work between 9 and 6 – 6:30. There are a lot of nice benefits for working with the bank, one of my favourites being the fact that we get free entry to a lot of museum exhibitions, such as the Infinity Mirror Rooms by Yayoi Kusama at Tate, which has been sold out for months now.
What would you say are the 3 biggest things you’ve learnt on your placement?
I think one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced when I started my placement was being able to understand all the technical jargons but you easily get used to it. When I joined the Bank, I had no financial knowledge so taking in all that information that was necessary for understanding how the bank systems are inter-connected was also a hurdle I had to conquer.