EXPEDIA GROUP TECHNOLOGY
When the Work Experience Students said “We will be back!!”
A week’s work experience for 12 students at Expedia Group London
Last June, Expedia Group™️ hosted 12 students in Year 10 or Year 12. The students learned about software and how software engineering teams function on a day to day basis.
The participants included:
- 6 girls from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, Angel, Islington
- 4 girls from Next Tech Girls (Putney High School)
- 2 guys as well from Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School and Vyners School
The week of work experience was designed to give a broader view of everything happening within a software company, with the main focus on coding.
Student were given a laptop according to their preference, either Mac or Windows.
Each day was filled with numerous topics, some hands on, some not. One session in particular called “Building a Website” was designed to run every day for two hours, with the objective to teach the students how to build a website, focusing on CSS and JavaScript.
Sessions:
We started with Introduction to Git — Part I because it was fundamental for the rest of the week. That was followed by one of our former interns who is now working as a permanent employee, talking about her Journey from School to Expedia.
We had a session on Accessibility as it was a prerequisite to the Building a Website session. We had a deep dive session on Git as part of Introduction to Git — Part II, as it is an important aspect of any software project. Many of the pupils were happy that we introduced Git, and one year 12 student said that he will use it for his project work.
No work experience is complete without a Python deep dive because the students were already learning the language as part of their school curriculum.
We talked about Cloud and what’s happening around it at the moment. The second day completed with a visit to our Usability Lab.
The third day started with a developer talking about what her day looks like as part of World of a Developer, followed by Time with HR/Recruitment, to better understand how recruitment works, interview techniques, CV etiquette, etc. The session Agile Lab helped them understand how ideas are realised into real product, and introduced Scrum methodologies.
Given there are so many programming languages, we had a session on Merits of Top 7 programming languages to give them a perspective on the programming world and what to learn. The Data Science and Machine Learning session gave them a peek into this cutting-edge technology area and how to make use of it.
Terms in Software Industry was a chance to remove the fear of acronyms and to understand what things really mean. The CI/CD session helped them to understand the software development life cycle.
It’s important to success to be able to express your ideas and share them, and a session on Public Speaking helped the students appreciate this. Security and Network helped them understand the importance of safeguarding the intellectual knowledge and resources of a company.
The students had individual mentors and they paired with their mentors during lunch time to ask any questions.
On the last day, as part of our Friday standup, the students completed a quiz.
Then, as part of the grand finale, they individually showcased how they designed and built their pages. All their work and code can be seen at https://github.com/jackarmley/next-tech-adventurers-2019. A huge thanks to Jack Armley for doing ‘building the website’ project.
This year’s curriculum was designed based on a retrospective of last year’s experience. We had another retrospective after this session so that we can improve next year.
Students were overwhelmed when they had to say goodbye. Most of them said “We will be back!”, either as part of their next academic year, as an intern from university, or as a permanent employee.
A huge thank to all the Expedia Group volunteers who came forward to run different sessions!
Looking forward to the next batch in 2020!
Featured photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash
