I got to do front-end, back-end, and dev ops related tasks, which is experience that is highly relevant to many different engineering roles

The reasons I chose to do a placement year as part of my degree

Doing a placement lets you test a potential career option without a long term commitment, and depending on your placement you may get a graduate offer! They're less competitive than summer internships, experience makes you stand out to recruiters, summer placements can be quite short and a lot of time may just be onboarding. 

What my typical work day looked like at STFC

The standard work day was 8:30 AM to 5:05 PM Mondays - Thursday, and a slightly earlier end on Friday at 4:20 PM. Some people also opted into Flex-Time, where you could take more flexible work hours (anywhere between 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM), and accrue extra leave days.

For the 1st hour of the day, I would check my emails before getting stuck into whatever software engineering task I had been working on the previous day. Then from 9:40-9:50, my Data and Software Engineering Group (DSEG), which included front end, back end, data and dev ops engineers, would have a daily stand up where we all recounted our previous days work and stated what we'd do today, along with any questions or announcements.

The rest of the day would usually just be continuing with my software engineering tasks. As a full stack-engineer, this could've been the front end, back end, or even dev ops related tasks. Most of the work I did was around implementation and testing, but sometimes I would be assigned design or deployment related tasks.

Larger features/user stories would be broken down into more unit sized issues, which would take me typically 1-2 days to implement, 2-3 days to write sufficient test cases, and 1-2 weeks to go through a review process before being merged.

Some of my highlights and the skills I’ve learnt during the year

The best things about my placement was the exposure to a real software engineering work environment, and the freedom to do a wide range of tasks. Not only did I learn and utilise industry standard technologies that weren't covered on my course, but I also became aware of career paths that I hadn't heard of before, like dev ops engineers. Additionally, I got to do front-end, back-end, and dev ops related tasks, which is experience that is highly relevant to many different engineering roles.

On my placement, I had to learn +10 new programming languages/libraries/technologies to varying depths of expertise. Unlike university, you are not told how much you need to know, and you are not given any material to study with. You need to determine both of these things, by asking colleagues, and utilising your own research skills. That is an important skill that goes beyond software engineering, and working as a full stack engineer really strengthened this, because of the many different areas of the project I worked on.

Having to work more independently, and to a much higher standard was difficult at first, but really just became more manageable with time, not with any specific technique really. That's why I think being able to be stuck and confused with your work on a near daily basis without being dejected and upset is really valuable, since you can take on more challenging and rewarding job opportunities in the future.

How my course prepared me for my placement year

I think the best preparation was the group projects, especially the software engineering ones. This is because the actual software engineering tasks from the 1st and 2nd year group projects are actually very similar to what was done in industry!

One of the reasons I was looking forward to doing a software engineering placement was to see if I still enjoyed doing software engineering (SWE) in industry, or if it was wildly different to university. I enjoyed it just as much, which I think shows how accurate and good of a representation the university SWE group projects are to real, industry SWE.

My current career plans post-placement

Currently, and prior to my placement, I was more interested in a career in AI than SWE. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy my placement and I now know if my career path in AI does not work out, I can come back to SWE. Having work experience in the area also helps make me more competitive for these roles in case I change my mind in the future.

Some final words of wisdom… 

I think the biggest reason people choose not to do a placement is because they'll spend 1 year less with their friends, and they might not know anyone coming back. However, I don't think this is as bad in reality. 

I still talk to my closest friends who have left university now most weeks, and it was actually easy to make new friends coming back. Other placement students coming back may also not have many friends still at university, so if you recognise anyone from your year, don't feel shy to say hi, since they're in the same boat as you!