I have decided that I am going to keep a diary of my experiences at my work placement year at Anritsu Ltd. The placement is part of my Computer Science degree at the University of Hertfordshire. I hope this account will be read by people who are thinking of doing a placement year or those who are just interested in the sort of thing that goes on at work in the real world!

I started on 1st September 2009 and it is now Friday so I have been here for 4 days. So far I have not had a great deal to do because the team I am working in have a project deadline coming up, so they are busy trying to finish their work. Myself and James (also a placement student from Herts Uni) have been reading a book on Java (the language we will be doing most fo our work in). We have been told to study this book as we will be sitting the Sun Certified Java Programmer qualification. We ahve also been told by someone who has already done it, that it is harder than any exam we will ever sit at uni! So not exactly “light” reading. As well as this we have done all the necessary health and safety nonsense, but I suppose its got to be done!

Today has been a slightly more interesting day, we have a task to set up our development environments by following some documents we have been given. We were told we must update these documents with any difficulties we may experience as they have not been maintained very well. So far everything in the document seems to be completely wrong so we have been guessing our way through alot of it. I have already come accross alot of comcepts and programs that I have no understanding of! I will write about these in a later post, as this blog is also designed to be a reminder for myself of what I have covered.

I have also started drinking coffee, now I feel like a proper office worker!

Phil