Hello everyone, today I want to talk about the Bright Network Internship Experience that I attended earlier this week. I came across it two weeks ago when I was watching a YouTuber called Eve Cornwell that was sponsored by Bright Network. Eve is a law-based YouTuber, but I went on the website to see if there was an event based on software and saw that there was a technology internship experience available and I thought why not apply. Honestly, it was a miracle that I got the 3 days off from work, as we have to give 2 weeks warning and it was less than 2 weeks away.

On the first day of the experience we had a couple of talks from bright network about networking and wellbeing which I found very useful. The after that we watched talks from lots of different companies that are well known in the technology industry such as Google, Bloomberg, Amazon, and Vodafone. These talks were very interesting and insightful. Googles presentation talked about job interviews and how to be better prepared for them and recommended a textbook called cracking the coding interview which I ordered. it contains all the software-based questions you could get asked within an interview so if you master this textbook you will be very prepared. Ive had a look at some of the questions and it looks very complicated, but I will slowly work through it during my university course.

Bright Network gave as a work task to do on the second day. We had to create a PowerPoint as a manager of a department to introduce facial recognition software to a banking app using Agile development. We had to research how agile works, the problems facial recognition could cause, create user stories, and make sure security was also covered due to it being for a banking app. I struggled at the start but once I found my flow I did the PowerPoint fairly quickly which gave me time to look over job opportunities from companies giving talks the day prior. Some of them had amazing apprenticeship on offer but always required good A-Level results which I don’t have. I’m hoping that when I get my diploma, that I can start getting more responses from jobs and apprenticeships. If not then I’ll have to continue studying for the full degree.

The third day was very short and ended at 2pm which was much easier than the two 9-5 days before. All we did was mark each other’s PowerPoints and reflect on feedback based on the mark scheme Bright Network gave us. We had one more talk about collaboration and teamwork with how it boosts productivity and reduces errors in our work. My PowerPoint wasn’t as good as I thought but I had loads of useful feedback to improve my PowerPoint.

Overall, I’m really glad I took on the internship experience as I learnt so much over the 3 days. Hopefully more opportunities like this will come up as its fun and looks good on a CV. Ive got to admit I’m super tired though, Ive basically worked 7 days this week but its been a good week.

<3 Jordan