Cyber Security Placement Student Review

As a whole I loved my placment, the people I worked with treated me like any other employee and made me feel like part of the team. I enjoyed the work I was given and felt I was really making a differnece.

I had an interesting blip in my placement whereby my appendix burst and I ended up having 5 weeks off work. It was actually a collegue that ended up taking me to the hospital and staying with me all day while I had surgery. My collegues definetly felt like family!

This varied as I went round the different rotations in the department and had different managers to report into. All gave good guidance and were very supportive if I had any issues or needed any support with something. The family feel to the department made me feel like I could ask anyone anything.

This again varied, but in my final rotaion I found a good balance of work and was getting good exposure to a number of different things.

This increased as I went through the placement (as expected), there were also some points when I was given a lot of responsiility when there was a shortage of staff and I had to step up.

I've learnt how to prioritise work and also work in a team to get the most out of people. The SDI course while on placement looked at different peoples strengths and how to approach them to get the most out of them, it will be really useful going forward in group projects at uni and beyond.

Very friendly and everyone wanting the best for each other. There was definetly a focus on making sure that the placement strudents in the department were doing ok. It wasn't the most energetic and 'fun' office but there was always people to have a laugh with now and again or for a drink at the pub after work.

It wasn't very well organised at all in my opinion. There was the overall idea there of having 4 rotations and get exposure to the whole department, but the reality of it was very unstrutured within most of the rotations. There was little to no planning and no collaboration between managers. The overall idea and concept was great but lack of planning put a dampener on it.

I was able to do a number of industry recognised training courses which was great. One of them followed on perfectly from what I had done at Uni. There was also the oppurtunity to do soft skills courses which was also greatly appreciated. Personal Effectiveness taught me ways to appoach prioritizing tasks and also how to effectively speak to people to get my point across.

I currently have a part time job at Computacenter while I complete my final year at university. If I continue performing well there is a possibility of a full time role at the end of it but not guranteed. There unfortunately isn't a Cyber Security Graduate role that I can apply for.

My department was really sociable and I had many a good evening in the pub with my collegues. The other students on placement formed seperate groups and we weren't all that good at organising events for all of us. There was only 18 of us so it was definetly possible but unfortunately didn't happen.

As we were quite near to london prices were quite high compared to what I was used to in Loughborough. There was a spoons nearby my house that had some more student friendly prices which was great! There was also an aldi closeby that meant I could stay on budget with food.

There was only the students union at the Uni of Herts to go to in Hatfield and it was really pricey and hard to get into if you weren't a student. As we were fairly close to London we went out there a fair bit but it was very expensive!

There wasn't that many oppurtunities to get involved with activities outside of work which is a shame as I would have loved to have done some. I think theres an oppurtunity to organise sporting and charity event and get a lot more people involved. This would be helped by having a day off a year for charity work like some other companies have.