Working in the ITPI team
My experience working as a student…
“You are accepted for the job”, this is how all work experiences start and this one was no exception. Although the beginning is always the same, the rest varies a lot and after a few days of working in the innovation team, I realized the uniqueness of working for IT Partnering & Innovation.
I am a first-year software engineering student who applied for a part-time developer job in ITPI just two months after I started studying at Lancaster University. I have been interested in innovations of all sorts since my childhood and during my high school years, I presented a few innovative projects in various school competitions. Combined with my passion for programming, ITPI seemed to be a good fit for a job after I started studying at the university. Furthermore, the team uses my most favourite programming language, so I did not hesitate to apply.
I got assured by my colleagues that the first day is a bit confusing for everyone. Well, except for Brian. When he started working for ITPI, he had been already working for ISS according to my colleague next to me. Anyway, he is now my boss and leader of our innovation unit. On the first day, I was paired with a seasoned developer Aaron who was showing me what is our unit going to be working on. At that time we just started the L.U. project and the whole infrastructure for the chatbot was still in its infancy. This is apparently going to be the first project at the university which is hosted fully on a cloud. I was so excited about that, but on the other hand, AWS — the cloud have used, was a completely new thing for me.
AWS was actually new for everybody in the team. And as I noticed thanks to our daily stand-up meetings, we were all learning together and mastering the new way of developing by helping one another to meet our goals for the L.U. project. At first, stand-ups were a bit of a challenge for me, since English is my second language. But after a while, it felt natural to stand in a circle every morning with my colleagues and talk about my barriers and what I had been working on.
Fast-forward few months and I totally got used to the flow of development in our unit and the agile way of doing things. Thanks to my colleagues, every time I had some question about the technology we were using, I got pointed to exactly what I needed to know, and thus I learned quickly and under their guidance mastered that part of technology to be able to develop independently next time.
I am glad to work in ITPI and push my development skills further and learn new technologies. It’s the first time I have worked in a bigger team and learned how important good team-work is. Also as an ambitious developer, I value the unique opportunity of innovation team to explore new ways of doing things which I can later see in everyday life after I leave the office and turn into a student again.
