Rebecca Wood transcript


I chose this course because it gave me lots of opportunities. For example, the KITC in final year which is a consulting firm that you work for for the final year in both semesters if you want. You get the opportunity to get some experience in a real business situation. Also, I really enjoyed doing the year industry, which is something that I really was keen to do because of my lack of experience before university. And finally it's a degree where actually it starts from very very basic and, as I hadn't done any prior computer science, it was ideal for what I wanted. 

A recent piece of work I've taken part in is um part of one of the cryptography modules that I've done. It required us to look at some like encrypted text and find ways to decrypt it and looking at different ciphers and maybe how to use them and work out what key to use and things like that. And I found it really interesting because actually it's something that you learn a lot about and you hear a lot about, for example like Alan Turing, and things like that. And actually, you just got the chance to actually really try it out for yourself and I've really enjoyed it for that reason. 

My year in industry was actually at a firm called Capacitas, which is a performance engineering firm and I was a junior analyst there. This allowed me to work as a consultant with lots of companies like easyJet Domino's and some other large companies that many might know. So my role at Capacitas was as a junior analyst, I was working predominantly on a project with easyJet, where I was looking at the performance of their homepage website and they were they were just about to change it to their new website and we were checking it in a test environment for any bugs and slow CPU and things like that, checking that the memory was okay. And it was a really interesting year because actually I got to see firsthand how I was impacting their website because they had to make changes based on what I was saying. 

The KITC is a company within the University where students of the computing school get to work on real-life projects with generally micro companies and get to gain more experience over their final year. So, at the KITC you get to work on a variety of projects. One of the projects I'm really enjoying at the moment is I'm working on creating a workshop for a small company called Start my Biz. It's involving cyber security and we're going to be teaching small business owners how to
keep their companies cyber secure. 

Once I've graduated from the University of Kent I am considering doing a Master's in business analytics, this is to bridge the gap between business and computer science. There are lots of them jobs out there for computer scientists and I just really like to work within a small company where I can maybe do a bit of both as far as computers and computing and the business side of things.