University placement student returns with a host of skills and experiences

Our First University placement student returns to Northumbria University with a host of skills and experiences. 

Sam started at WJPS as a Student Developer in August 2018 working on a yearlong placement at WJPS Ltd as part of his Computer Science degree at Northumbria University. His role included dealing with support issues and fixing changes through coding.

Sam said "I chose WJPS for my placement year because I didn’t want to go to a large company where I would have been given repetitive, unimportant tasks, I thought that I would have more of an impact as part of a smaller team. I also knew that the work I would be doing was going to be varied and interesting." Sam certainly made an impact, James Proctor, Managing Director of WJPS said "I thought he would be a good at dealing with support issues, and ways of fixing these by making small changes to code etc, but he turned out to be an excellent developer. He brought the latest skills to the team and fresh ideas, but he also learnt why we did certain things certain ways."

Throughout the year Sam was involved in some of our major products and worked closely with some of our larger clients including the NHS. Sam told us "I got to practice working on lots of different applications with a variety of languages that I learned on my course including C#, PHP, SQL and JavaScript. It was also very useful to work as part of a team of developers in a professional office environment".However the main advantage of working at WJPS was that "I was being able to work on large, challenging developments to products that allowed me to make decisions on the functionality and structure which I may not have been able to do at a larger organisation"

WJPS has regular student placement opportunities for Computer Science or similar degree subjects, so if you’re interested in getting involved with us keep an eye on your university placement boards and our website, or do what Sam did, use your initiative and drop us an email!

One piece of advice Sam would give to the next student is "be to be ready to work independently but not to be scared to ask for help if you need it". MD James Proctor said "we love having students into work for us and to give them the opportunity to learn from us, but also it gives us the experiences and skills they have learnt from university to move our products forward. This isn’t one way, working as a student placement developer means you would be an integral part of the team for the time you are with us"

Published: 14/08/2019 Published by: WJPS

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