I graduated from Bristol with an MEng in Aeronautical Engineering in 2010. Upon graduating, I had initially tried very hard to get into a role within systems + control engineering (roles of this type are very few in the UK). The company ended up taking someone more experienced and so my search for a new role in a variety of different fields began. I had the choice between going into munitions design at BAE systems, an IT consultant at IBM or into the Technical Graduate Scheme at RBS.
My initial exposure to coding came during my degree studies. After graduating, I searched around for organisations that would allow me to grow in this area and that were working on large-scale complex problems. I ended up applying to banks as working as a software developer in this field seemed the most challenging option at the time. They also had the best training schemes as far as I could tell. A few friends from my course had come here on the Technology graduate scheme and given it rave reviews so choosing RBS was an easy decision.
I met my current line manager by sheer chance at an internal TechStock event (in which dev inside the organisation is showcased) I’d taken my Raspberry Pi powered robot arm to. Years later when we met again and I joined his team, I found out that he’d remembered me from that event; we’d had a discussion about robot arm stabilisation using gyros. So I think I just got lucky… really lucky.
