How my career took off with a placement

Surbhi Mago graduated with a BEng (Hons) in Computer Hardware and Software Engineering in 2019. She decided to follow the placement option during her studies, landing an internship with Amadeus IT Services (London), one of the top ten travel technology companies in the world.

Fast forward to 2020 and Surbhi is now happily employed with her placement company as a graduate software developer in the Dynamic Intelligence Hub team. Here she shares her experiences of her journey to employment.

What have you learnt during your time on placement?

My placement at Amadeus was a unique opportunity to learn technical skills in a ‘live’ work environment. I got the chance to work as part of a team on two different products, testing and enhancing my skills over a short period of time. I developed many technical skills whilst working with front-end projects as part of a research and development team. ns which used http restful APIs, and chat-bot NLP agents like Dialogflow (api.ai) by Google.

This included working with frameworks, performing testing and maintenance of products already in production, using programming languages like Python, Java, HTML and other libraries like Bootstrap, Spring, Pandas and Keras.

I also worked as part of the innovation and research team, developing web applications which used http restful APIs, and chat-bot NLP agents like Dialogflow (api.ai) by Google.

What exciting projects have you worked on?

I got the opportunity to work on variety of projects, the most interesting one being in machine learning. Here is a list of projects I worked on:.

• Facebook chat-bot: Machine learning
  DialogFlow: A machine leaning NLP (Natural language processing) project to create an agent which could act as a chat-bot and do flight search. It consisted of inputting training phrases, context management and output response.
• Spear: Maintenance
  A product in production which is used to copy PNR (Passenger name records) from one testing system to another. I was particularly responsible for the maintenance of it.
• Watchlist: Front-end
  Another front-end web application which was used by various airlines to send files through FTP to the Amadeus system. I made the front-end user-interface POC (Proof of concept) and was tasked with raising the budget from higher management.
• Cognitive framework: Back-end
  Coding for a cognitive framework using spring-application.
• FPGA Research
  A search on various processors available and how FPGA can be used to replace them in datacentres to provide parallel-processing. This was a comparative research on GPUs, CPUs and FPGAs.

Why would you recommend going on placement during your studies?

There are a number of reasons I would highly recommend you include a placement year in your studies:

• For personal and professional growth
  You get to learn how to work in a professional environment. It is a chance to interact with higher management and learn from their experience. You will also gain valuable communication skills alongside other industrial skills; it is a brilliant chance to socialise with people in industry and develop your network, which will be beneficial in the future.
• You get paid to learn
  An internship is a golden chance to get paid while you have the chance to work on different projects and learn at the same time. You might even get to travel to present you projects too! There is also the advantage of being able to ask questions to those in the know; you’re on placement to learn and Amadeus were always willing to listen to any questions I had.
• For personal and professional growth
  You get to learn how to work in a professional environment. It is a chance to interact with higher management and learn from their experience. You will also gain valuable communication skills alongside other industrial skills; it is a brilliant chance to socialise with people in industry and develop your network, which will be beneficial in the future.
• It tests you
  A placement puts you in situations where you can test and learn how to manage stress and time. Get a taste of different sectors and see what suits your personality; you will then be in a better position to make a judgement on what career path to follow.

Now a graduate software developer at Amadeus, I get to work on real-time applications to help airlines take actions based on their real- time data.

As I look outside the window from my working desk, the view I see is of Heathrow runway. It makes me so happy to know that more than 80% of the flights taking off from that runway are using Amadeus Software, a company of which I am a proud part of now.

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