Hi! I’m Chloe, a Final Year BEng Computing student at Imperial! Coming from a Hong Kong and Welsh background, I’m a very diverse person and I like to meet new things and people! I also dabble into various branches of Technology – currently some NLP and Computational Linguistics for my final year project.In DoC, many of us are very career-focused, it’s great knowing how everyone is doing, and that there isn’t much competition within the department, everyone is helping everyone to reach further. We also have DoCSoc and DoC Opportunity Liaisons, which loop us in available job opportunities. If you need help with applications, just ask a mate within the degree, they will be able to provide a steady number of application sites 🙂
In my first year, I had no clue what I’d end up with as we walk into lockdown and the whole pandemic, and I ended up having the opportunity to do two Student Shapers within Imperial – One for Redesigning the Huxley Foyer with Inkeri Hibbins and Dr Robert Chatley, and the other with Dr Thomas Lancaster researching on Academic Integrity using NLP. I didn’t do an internship, but these were better projects that helped sculpt my skillset while allowing me to explore different realms of pathways – and helped me figure my interest in Design Engineering! Doing hackathons in the first year also helped with getting to play with prototyping and pitching ideas, which kickstarted my interest in product management.
In the second year, everyone starts finding some internships for experience, and I was lucky to end up with a couple of offers – I ended up picking a Spring Engineering Internship with Goldman Sachs over Easter in the London Global Markets Division, and working with Google as a Software Engineer Intern over summer, with a team in Warsaw working on Cloud Infrastructure. Both of them were virtual due to the pandemic, but it was a really amazing experience, and we are at the point of getting used to remote working that it didn’t affect much (other than the free food). It allowed me to try out teams that previously would require relocation. This allowed me to meet a more diverse group of coworkers and dabble into better time management for meetings and work in general.
The ability to get into the industry and the fact that a lot of group projects are relevant really helps the whole project! By the start of the third year, you would’ve done 5 term-long group projects that are significant and really helpful – from a varying tech stack to understanding technical architecture and system design. I really think that gave me a massive kickstart in landing opportunities since my second year.
I thought I wouldn’t have enjoyed Software Engineering as much; from the first year I’ve been debating on what my real interests were, and I sway between Product Management and Software Engineering a lot, and doing Computing always seemed like there is one option – when it is infinite. I ended up enjoying software engineering a lot and did a couple of internships on it, but I’m also dabbling in Product whilst in the industry to put my passion into side projects!
So I’m still trying to put an answer to that myself, but what is your dream job?