Insight Onsite Tessella Placement write-up

As part of the agreement for participation in the Insight Onsite programme just wrote a short case study about my experience of the placement to go up on Imperial College Careers Service's website, as follows:

The Insight Onsite placement for me was an opportunity to brush up on my software development skills knowing I wanted to move into a software engineering role following completion of my PhD. Moreover, almost four years on from my previous industrial work placement it was an opportunity to get some fresh experience down on my CV and to talk about at forthcoming job interviews. My work placement was with Tessella Plc, an international technology and consultancy firm specialising in R&D. The placement was conducted four days a week over a period of five weeks, allowing me one day a week to continue with PhD commitments. I was delegated a well-defined self-contained assignment as part of a larger project (The Mantid Project) based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire aimed at providing a platform which supports high-performance computing on neutron and muon data. The particular assignment delegated to me involved building a central repository system (client- and server- side) by means of HTML, Python, Python Server Pages, MySQL, JavaScript and Subversion (revision control system) for scientists to share and search scripts/algorithms as part of the Mantid Project. The work involved learning and applying the necessary technologies with the help of colleagues as well as working closely with the project manager to ensure user requirements were correctly understood and met within allocated time. As part of the placement I was also given the opportunity to meet and speak with various teams/employees at Tessella’s head office in Abingdon, Oxfordshire to get a broader understanding of the various technology roles on offer and I was even granted the opportunity to sit in on meetings with clients and senior management, which was greatly beneficial. All in all, the placement was a positive experience which I would strongly recommend and which I am thoroughly glad to have partaken in.