Oxford Computer Consultants

Daily Life

I enjoyed working from home as it meant I could

structure my time in my own way and didn't have to

pay for transport to and from work. I usually got up

early and started work around 9 by having a team

briefing for the day with my team. We would then lay

out a plan of action for the day and regularly check in

with one another to see how we were all getting along. Sometimes we worked collaboratively

on projects, such as the promotional brochure for the company, on a Zoom call, but we usually

had separate tasks which we went off to complete and then reconnected back at the end of the

day to update one another. About once a week we would connect with the CEO and fill him in

on what we had done and find out if there was anything else that he wanted us to do.

Lasting Impressions

I really enjoyed working in the team and has confirmed my aspirations of wanting to work on

strategy consulting as I really enjoyed coming up with solutions to some of the problems facing

the company. It also made me more aware of some of the many issues facing start-up firms and

some of the ways we can go about fixing them. Overall, it was a good experience to work in a

team and learn about strategy development and consider how to scale a small business.

Claudia Cilleruelo Pascual, Keble College, MA Mathematics, Second Year

Undergraduate, a mixture of in-person and remote working

Work Projects

During my time I worked on Ami, an online platform that connects those wanting to help in

their community with organisations looking for volunteers. I had programmed extensively in

Python but had no prior experience in C#, ASP.NET or JavaScript, the 3 principal tools I would be

using in the development of Ami. I was taken aback by OCC’s willingness to provide me with the time and resources to do this learning despite only interning for 6 weeks.

The aspects of Ami I was involved with varied from day to day: from adding functionality

enabling volunteers to log their hours, developing profile subsections of the volunteer account,

developing the messaging system between organisations and volunteers, to making the system

accessible for users with screen readers. When I first arrived, I was assigned a mentor, which

was hugely beneficial to both my technical growth but also my understanding of the company.

Very early on I met the managing director as well as several tech leads – who were all

extremely welcoming, and everyone was willing to lend a hand.

Daily Life

I worked in person for the first 4 weeks and online for

the majority of the last 2. OCC has fairly flexible

working hours, I had to do a total of 37.5 hours a week

but beyond being in the office for the core hours (10-

12 and 2-4), the rest of the time was completely up to

me. I’d get in at around 8:45 and have a meeting with the ami team at 9:45 and as part of the Innovation Delivery Team, the daily stand-up at 10. This

was my opportunity to learn about the different projects the team was working on, as every

developer in ID gives an outline of their day.

There is a huge sense of collaboration as most developers are working on several projects at

once, so will at some point or other have worked with almost all the developers in the team. I

would then spend the rest of the day tackling one or several tasks at hand with scattered calls

during the day with my mentor and other developers. The tasks varied significantly as

summaries above^ and as well as programming I was able to do some code reviews. Once a

week I would attend the weekly OCC lunch, where I was able to meet employees I didn’t interact with on a daily basis. It was great to have another intern at the same time at OCC.

Lasting Impressions

I really enjoyed the internship and I felt it provided me with an immersive experience of what it

is like to be a developer. I’m very glad to have walked away not only with a real world perspective of what the sector is like, and what working as a developer entails, but also to have

come away with proficiency in 3 new languages in the space of 6 weeks. OCC made sure from

very early on to treat the 2 interns as contributing members of the team, and this made a huge

difference to our experience as we were soon able to see the impact we were making on a

technical level, and we were able to work side by side with industry professionals.

MMath Mathematics, Third Year Undergraduate (of a four-year course), in-person

working

Work Projects

I did development work on the Ami project, which is a website for volunteering organisations to

help match volunteers (who can sign up on the public-facing part of the website) to their

volunteering opportunities (which are also listed, in anonymised form, on the public-facing part

of the website). I was integrated fully into the

development team, submitting code as pull requests

to the central Git repository, and reviewing the code

of my fellow intern. I did a good deal of work on the

area of the website for logged-in volunteers, adding

various pages to the volunteer profile section where

they could input preferences and personal details.

I also did a lot of refactoring and maintenance of the code, to make future development work

easier. The development work was both frontend and backend - I worked on everything from

the styling and presentation of the website to the business logic and database schema. The host

organisation provided a good deal of support - I was assigned a mentor, who helped a lot in the

initial set up as well as getting me acquainted with the code repository (which was quite large).

Daily Life

The office was fortunately very close to my accommodation, so getting to work was only a ten-

minute walk which was very convenient. At the start of each working day there were two

"stand-up" meetings - one just for the project I was working on, which only had the four to six

(depending on the day, and including me) developers who were working on the project; and

one which had everyone in the department. The former was brief, but important as it provided

an opportunity to bring up any specific problems we'd run into while working on the project.

The latter was less directly useful as an intern, but it was good to be able to keep track of all the

other projects going on in the department, which I'd have never kept up with otherwise. There

was one other intern (who also came through the Summer Internship Programme); they were

my main companion for socialisation, and there was

a lot of mutual assistance between us on the

project. I didn't socialise a huge amount with the

other people in the office aside from my mentor

and my fellow intern - but this is probably more of a

reflection of me than of the internship itself!

Lasting Impressions

I really enjoyed the internship, and feel like I gained a great deal of good experience from it. My main aims in taking the internship were to get a feel for how working in an IT/software-dev

type career would feel, and to become more experienced with working on large, mature code

bases with a proper task and issue management system; both of which I feel I got a good

handle on. As a whole, the internship has confirmed to me that this is a career path that I

definitely could take, but I'm still uncertain if it's the one I necessarily want to take, since there

are a huge number of other career paths which I have yet to consider.