Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Aaron has been getting on!

‘To start things off, I want to give you a short bio of myself, which will help you create an overview about me before I go into detail about my placement!

Well first things first, my name’s Aaron Sullivan, I’m 20, I absolutely can’t live without music, I design a lot of digital art and love technology. I am also a student at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. I have been at the University for 2 years now and have loved every aspect of University life. But, there’s always a but isn’t there, have decided on a change of plan for a year. I have decided on a year out in industry to help me improve my chances of getting a job after University and to get some well needed experience. As well as these two reasons, I also didn’t fancy finishing off my degree just quite yet, the past two years have gone way too fast in my opinion and I don’t think I’m ready to leave just yet.

The process of actually finding a placement was definitely a challenge to say the least. I first started out looking for placements within games companies across the UK, about 100 were contacted in one form or another. After absolutely no luck within this industry I moved towards web design and graphics within Cheltenham, again with no luck due to a lack of responses I moved on. It finally came down to software, which in my mind, after 11 weeks of placement is the right industry for me. If you get down from poor responses from companies, no luck from interviews, don’t worry, you just need to keep on top of your game and keep trying. If you keep adapting your CV for specific job roles, prepare yourself for interviews and get your CV in the right door then you will eventually get the placement you have been searching for, it just doesn’t usually appear after a couple of weeks of searching. I say this from experience.

On the 1st of June 2010, I started my first day at Trigger Software Ltd in Cheltenham. I had seen the office in one or two pictures and briefly on my interview before, but in the flesh as a working environment, it really is a nice place to work. I was given a desk, a computer was setup for me and the usual aspects were created for me over the course of the day, an email account etc. From then on until now I have been doing absolutely all sorts. Over the 10 weeks that I have been at Trigger I have done a mixture of testing, support, some programming, some office admin, backups and lots more, all extremely interesting aspects. At first I did think, “Yeah, get to do programming straight away”, but now looking back, It has been extremely beneficial to get an overview of all areas of the company before going deep down into code.

Well there’s the overview I promised you, and some detail chucked in for good measure. My next blog posts on RateMyPlacement will be in detail every few weeks, so If you want to read more about how I’m doing, keep looking back every so often.’

Find out more from Aaron and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!