First Steps Into Professional Life.

First Steps Into Professional Life.

Weeks 1 & 2 of QA Training.

Salford Quays: https://flic.kr/p/dD8R2r

Some Background

I never expected to become an IT consultant.

In fact whenever someone appeared on a daytime TV game show saying they were an "IT Consultant" I would consider it a life goal to never be like them.

During university the plan was always to do a PhD and continue academia. I was genuinely passionate about studying mathematics, I was achieving high grades in the vast majority of my modules and my lecturers were fully supportive and expecting me to do a PhD.

Unfortunately, when I applied for PhD's I was unable to secure funding. This came as somewhat of a shock.

The fact of the matter is; academic funding is closely tied to politics - and the political climate is not favourable to research in pure mathematics at the moment. There just wasn't enough funding available, and on top of this, the standard of candidates was unusually high this year.

This was a problem. I had never given any thought to what I wanted to do if a PhD wasn't possible.

Having finished university with no clear plan for the coming year, I had to sit down and think about what other career sectors I was interested in. After some thought I realised that the IT sector was more appealing than I first thought.

Getting Into IT

The main feature which attracted me to mathematics was the problem solving. I love the feeling of overcoming a difficult problem which I've been stuck on for some time - and the other place where I had found this feeling was in the world of programming.

My programming journey began quite late for someone who is now an IT professional. I had never been inspired to even try writing code until my Stochastic Processes lecturer showed us a simulation of one of the processes we were studying - and I suddenly became inspired to learn how to visualize the mathematics I was studying using code.

That example was written using Processing - a Java based language which I will be written much about in the coming weeks - and it is Processing which I have to thank for getting me in to programming.

Over the next year I did more and more in Processing, as well as learning Python. I eventually used both of these languages in my Final Year Project (which I had to do as part of the fourth year of my degree) to visualize an example of an abstract geometric object which I was studying for my project.

As well as programming as part of my final year project, I also started attending York Code Dojo - a programming meet up in York where programmers in the area got together to eat pizza and solve some interesting programming problems. These problems would be very different from anything seen in the daily life of a professional programmer, and designed to be approachable by all levels of programming ability.

These experiences very much helped to guide me towards the IT career path, and soon enough I was sending out CV's and applying for any job I thought I stood a chance of being any good at.

Route To QA

Having finished university and moved back home to Salford, I spend the majority of my summer applying for jobs, attending interviews and trying to improve my programming skills.

I was advised that front-end web development was a good area to get into as there are many jobs available and learning and showcasing your skills is particularly easy (just make a fancy portfolio website with a bunch of cool web games on it!). I put a lot of work into learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript and even completed the FreeCodeCamp Front-End Development Certificate. Doing all this, however, only made me realise how much I disliked web development (although making web games is kinda fun).

During the job hunting process I got a call from a recruiter at QA who described a career to me that sounded very appealing. I did a phone interview and was invited to an assessment day.

The presentation at the assessment day helped convince me that QA was a good choice to start my career, and after I got the call informing me that I had been selected to join QA I was relieved that the job hunting processes was finally over. I'd had enough of job applications and interviews.

And now here I am, sitting at a computer in QA, writing this blog...