Ana Jalba, King\u2019s Alumni and Computer Science with a Year in Industry graduate completed her placement at Nomura in 2016\/17 and now works in Software Engineering at Privitar. Two years on, Ana tells us about her career journey since graduating and how her placement helped her along the way.<\/p>\n
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I joined King\u2019s in 2014 on a 3-year Computer Science degree. In my second year, I learned that I could switch to a degree that included a year in industry and I decided to take the opportunity. Through that, I managed to spend 14 months on a Software Engineering placement at Nomura International, an investment bank based in London. Now, two years after graduation, I work as a Software Engineer at Privitar, a startup that offers a data privacy platform to customers. Read on to find out about this journey!<\/em><\/p>\n At the end of my first year of Computer Science I spent two weeks during the spring interning at Nomura, and they offered me an interview for a summer internship for the following year. At that point, I had no idea if I wanted to work in the industry or be a researcher, so I thought it would be good to see what working full-time is like.<\/strong><\/p>\n I decided to switch my degree to Computer Science with a year in industry during my second year of university, as I thought I would get a much better idea about what it\u2019s like to work as a software engineer if I spent a whole year working.<\/strong> Not having exams and getting paid for a year was also extremely tempting! Fortunately, Nomura was also able to extend my summer internship to a year\u2019s placement. The flexibility to do that really helped, and taking a year in industry was one of the best decisions I made for my career as a software engineer.<\/p>\n The best part of working for a year at a company during my course was practicing programming every working day and learning from professionals<\/strong>. This turned out to be extremely useful for my final year as I gained confidence in myself, knew what to focus on in my practical work and had a head-start in knowing what kind of industry I wanted to work in after university.<\/p>\n The skills I learned during my placement also helped me start my career after graduating. As I already had a full year of practice in the industry, I could talk about my real-life experiences and stand out against other candidates when interviewing for graduate positions.<\/strong><\/p>\n I cannot recommend taking a year in industry highly enough. Since graduating, my roles have involved working with big data and a lot of the skills I learned during my placement are still relevant in my current job.<\/strong> So you never know what essential skills you might learn in a year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"