The Year in Computing is essentially an additional add-on to your degree, to enhance your skills and expand what your degree currently is. And you can do it after your second year, in between second and third year, or you can do it after you finish your degree after third year. So it's really nice you can place it where you want to, you can have a small break, and it's essentially a year whereby you're treated as a first-year computer science student. They allow you to learn about front-end stuff, back-end stuff, different coding languages and theory of computing Ð just from right at the ground level, working the way up, with no computing knowledge required. 

What I enjoyed most about the Year in Computing was actually the weekly interactions you'd have. You'd have lots of practical classes, you'd have different assignments of different lengths and everything like that and you'd be able to work together with all the students in your class because it's a fairly small class in comparison to the larger undergraduate degrees. So you really form a lot of friendships and work together on the different assignments you're given. And you've all come from a potentially non-computing background, so you're all in the same boat and so it's actually really nice because you're all working towards something together so there's actually quite a nice community about it. So there was a big support network in learning together. I thought that was what I enjoyed most about that compared to another undergraduate degree where you didn't quite get that same feeling. 

If someone was thinking of doing the Year in Computing I would straightaway just say 'do it' because it's such a nice break from your degree. You can enhance, you can absolutely be doing chemistry and go into computing. It allows you to really go into something completely new, but with the support and the help that allows you to just completely grow from the foundations of computing all the way up. And it's something that... there's so many different modules, from front-end to back-end to theory to user interaction and all of those different modules so that there will be something in there that you might actually find that's your new home. I never expected that I would be going into computing. 

I did the Year in Computing and I enjoyed pretty much every single bit of it and that's how I found my new career. So I would say, 'just go for it'. You've got a one-off chance. You're at uni anyway. Absolutely go for it, because it was one of the best things that I added to my degree. So I've always been interested in computing but by doing a Year in Computing it really helped me; they taught so many different areas of computing it allowed everyone to find exactly where they wanted to go. 

At the end of the Year in Computing I actually got offered a job as a data migration specialist using some of the SQL code that we'd been taught, so that's an area that I'm definitely going into and it will be full-time once I've finished my Master's. And as well as that, it actually led me to go on to do a Master's in Computer Science. I felt like the Year in Computing was a really good foundation for that, to do the Master's, and that's really allowed me to now specialise to the point that computing is going to be a chosen career path. Whether that's front end, back end Ð that's still on the table, but computing's definitely become my life.