CAS Blog

So it’s been quite a while since I posted here and I thought I’d tie up the loose ends about what happened after my “waiting game” post in March.

The short version is that the company I was waiting to hear back from was Microsoft, and the reply was positive. I did a final few interviews before being accepted for an intership! After a few phone calls, my shiny new job was ready and waiting for me. Unlike most other companies, you don’t apply for a particular job at Microsoft, only to join their internship programme. They then decide where to put you depending on your areas of expertise and/or previous experience.

Since I had a stronger background in web development, they decided that rather than working in London on Windows Live and MSN, I would be based in Reading working on infrastructure, to give me something new to learn about. I had done a little work on infrastructure before, but never on the level I do now and I knew there was a lot to learn in a short time.

I work in the Microsoft Technology Centre (MTC) at Thames Valley Park, Microsoft’s UK HQ. My day-to-day job is to take care of a datacentre which is used by outside customers that come in to develop custom software together with developers from Microsoft. I have to make sure that I get all requirements beforehand, setting up the infrastructure, including any servers, client PCs and rooms that they require during their stay. While the customer is with us, I provide technical support to them and then at the end, wind everything up, back up the data and close everything down, ready for the next customer.

At time, it can be a tough job with some early and late hours and people who are less than complimentary, but overall, it’s a very enjoyable and rewarding job and I have definately learnt a lot about servers, networking and infrastructure as well as figuring out how to troubleshoot so many weird and wonderful errors!

Microsoft is a difficult company to get into and sometimes you might get light jabs from your friends for working for them, but the culture inside the company is relaxed and so much different from anything you’ll get at most of the other large IT companies.

If you’re studying computer science, IT or another related subject and are close to your industrial year or graduation, don’t give Microsoft a miss because you think it won’t be worth the effort or you’ve heard negative things about them. It’s most definately worth your time to apply, and if you get a job at the end of the day, it’ll look fabulous on your CV!

Well, it’s now 2 weeks to go until the end of my placement, and I think a new blog entry is long overdue. The past few weeks have been an interesting mix of having absolutely nothing to do at times, to rushing to complete something to a strict deadline. However, I now find myself having to wait once again for the Designer to check out my work so far and come back with some feedback. I’m bracing myself for the worst, which would be having to spend hours changing everything around, but there’s not much I can do to change that.

Moving slightly away from my project and onto a more general topic, for those who don’t know much about SEED there are 2 training days and a Finale as part of the placement. I missed the first training day since I was late starting, the second was a few weeks back, and earlier this week we had the Finale session. It was a really nice chance to see what everyone else had been doing on their SEED placements, despite a rather nerve-wracking 5 minutes in which I had to give my presentation and answer questions. It was just a great way to round off the 8 weeks, have a chance to tell everyone else what you had been doing the whole summer, and also get some nice free food (but that’s just a bonus). Also, there were prizes given out to the Top 3 students and a photographer to take (scarily precise) photos of the winners and the group as a whole.

I think a large chunk of my presentation consisted of me selling CAS to the audience, which was not done on purpose, but just happened to fill the gaps between trying to sell my incomplete project. Nevertheless, I was suitably embarassed and nervous, so in the end the presentation fulfilled its purpose. The point I was trying to get across most of all was that the Carrington Building is brilliant – honestly I wish I had known about CAS sooner, and I’m sure I’ll stop going on about it once term starts again and I get distracted by my third year project.

Although it’s been a bit of a quiet week, there have still been new things introduced to me that I wish I had known about sooner. The information library on the first floor of the Carrington building is absolutely jam-packed with information on pretty much every subject (EVEN biomedical engineering!), and every job sector. I should know, as I went through every single folder in that room.

There’s not a whole lot to report on this week, I’m hoping that next week will be the time when the wheels start turning and the project really goes into full-swing.

I went for a cultural jaunt in London the other week. Having confidently affirmed my interest in visiting art galleries and museums on my cv it struck me that it had been a while since I actually had done either activity. So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at something just in case asked to elaborate in interview. You never know. Queue: closure of the District and Circle Lines on ye goode olde London Underground. Apart from the peculiarly British, grim urban fatalism towards the foibles of public transport that this kind of thing inspires, it made me think of the multitude of ways in which we are at the mercy of technology. To double click or not double click? That is the (sometimes frustratingly over-important) question. Or maybe that’s just me.

Not that it’s all bad. Take jobs websites for example. A mixed bunch, to be sure. Prospects (pop www.prospects.ac.uk in your machine and it should come up) is helpful, particularly for first and second years. It gives lots of facts and figures associated with different types of jobs as well as vacancies. All sorts of useful stuff. It particularly reminds me of how I missed the boat in my second year when it comes to work experience. Summer spelt the daunting threshold of dissertation authorship but it looks like a lot of internships are geared towards students in this year group. (By the way, the dissertation isn’t the vile beastie it may seem to be, given proper handling. The library staff and study advisers are a very helpful lot if you need extra study support and help with finding material). If its arts and media jobs you’re looking for then artshub’s a good ‘un (www.artshub.co.uk). The job section of The Guardian website is worth a look at too. I’ve found you can discover sites by looking at others, so you can pick out particularly useful ones as you go along.

London was fine in the end. I spent a couple of peaceful hours wandering through the hushed, palatial grandeur of Tate Britain. Remember when you used to be able to say simply the Tate and everyone knew this is the one you meant? Happy searching. Click-click.

A little explanation. I’m currently volunteering at the Museum of English Rural Life. (If you’re thinking of doing so too, I highly recommend it: you’ll be with a great team of people and it’s a lovely place to work. If, on the other hand, you’ve already given volunteering a go and have your own views on its sundry benefits, delights or otherwise, I’d be happy to hear from you). I’m also facing the magic circle that seems to confront anyone just starting out on finding a career. You know the one. Grab a handful of job advertisements and many generally tell you that prior experience of some form or another is necessary. Fair enough. But where to start? For one thing, I’ve found volunteering is a good way to sample different aspects of the job. For another, you can talk to people on the inside who know a thing or two about it and they might just give you further useful info about what you should be thinking of next. After all, we’re told that networking is the name of the game.

What this does not necessarily solve, however, is the intricacies of that other thing you face when starting out with jobs- a piece of paper on which you declare your worthiness and brilliance to the world in the strictest professional terms. Or something like that. Whilst I find this is the case for cvs and job applications, the latter often gives clues on the particular areas in which you’ll need to shine. With a cv, it seems to be more a matter of how best to select, summarise and generally tinker with those aspects of life’s experience to date. To be frank, I haven’t had a huge amount to tinker with. Fairly regular toddling off to CAS has definitely been useful here- getting into the kind of thinking that renders life in all its richness and variety into jobspeak terms of ‘key skills and experience’ etc. It’s been very encouraging to see what can be done with scanty beginnings. So far, so good.