Many years ago, I came to Manchester as an industrial placement student from Germany. For me it was 6 months, and my main aim was to improve my English and my employability. It worked!
For the last few years, we have had Computer Science summer students in our team who worked on short projects for which we did not have the resources for within the Research Software Engineering (RSE) team. That experience was really good, both the researchers and the RSE managers were very impressed by the quality of work those students delivered. As a logical consequence the RSE group has managed to create three new roles for one-year long placements. We hope that this will be a continuing success for years to come.
The students who have joined us have enrolled in a Computer Science based course at the University which requires them to work as part of their studies. Being an RSE is a fulfilling profession and we aim to provide them with a positive experience of what the work is like. This will involve giving them real-life projects which will make a difference to researchers, integrating them into our RSE team and enthusing them with our work sprits.
It is no secret that recruiting into research IT roles has been difficult lately across all universities. At the same time, our researchers are still very successful in getting grant money for their work which requires our input and expertise. This means that the demand for our services is high and our resources are stretched. Not all the work that comes into our team requires a personal experience of the research environment - you can get a long way with just solid Software Engineering! And of cause we won’t just assign a project to our interns and disappear for the year but the entire RSE team will be here to support and guide them.
Who knows, maybe some of the students from today will be leading our RSE group in a few decades?
Meet The Students!
Benito Matischen
Hello I am Benito and I am studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University. I have experience with Java, Python, Spring and Django.
I chose to work with Research IT for a year because the role allowed me to contribute to research that could have a positive impact on society whilst acquiring real-world experience of software engineering.
Currently I will be developing web applications for researchers in the humanities and healthcare, such as a database for medical technologies and relevant case studies for NHS nurses and improving the Wagtail web framework used by the Web Applications Development Service team.
My hope for this year in RIT is to gain experience with a broad range of tools and acquire skills I might not have had otherwise in order to become a more capable software engineer.
Annie Zheng
Hello I am Annie and I am studying BSc Computer Science with Industrial Experience. I am familiar with programming languages such as Java, Python and C/C++; and have web development experiences using Spring and Vue.js frameworks.
I chose to do a placement year to improve employability, gain valuable work experience and develop my skills further; working with Research IT provides the opportunity to work with researchers who are experts in their field.
The first project I will be working on is a web application for the Faculty of Humanities; the web application will host student projects with the feature for bulk upload by the admins.
I hope to advance my technical and personal skills and possibly gain new ones from this placement year in Research IT.
Leo Messen
Hello I am Leo and I am studying Computer Science. I am familiar with Java, Python, and C/C++. More recently I gained experience with the Spring MVC Java framework which is particularly useful as it’s what I’ll be using on my first project.
I chose to work with Research IT because I value my work being interesting, and I think research is one of the most interesting and exciting fields to be a part of.
My first project will be working with the UoM Library to make an application called My Open Research (MOR). This will allow research services to share data with researchers and research managers about open access publications.
This year I hope to contribute to important research by providing researchers with the software they need, or that at least makes their lives a little easier. I also hope to acquire new skills that are best learnt in the real world and that will make me more employable as a graduate.