Blog and Portfolio
Posts tagged assignments
Employability, CV’s, interviews..
0November 12, 2011
Every year the uni runs a ‘weekend’ away at Gregynog for those students who are looking to do an industrial year. The idea is to help open student’s eyes as to what employers are looking for. It was a really useful weekend, and it really made you think hard. Many interview questions are quite challenging and it can be very hard to feel like you’ve nailed an impressive answer when there is so many things you could say. I found myself enjoying the interview stage quite a lot! It might seem unusual but I liked the pressure of trying to answer these hard questions, plus trying to account for things where the interviewer thinks they can catch you out. At times it feels like you are just trying to outwit each other! I should add, I do of course realise it is about a matching process, for both sides to find out if they are interested in and could work with each other.
My CV is very honest, so I didn’t have any problems with that. Certainly a few other students will have learnt not to claim themselves as an ‘expert’ or ‘have very good knowledge of’ when in fact they know little. The format in which the interviews took place was also good, we were able to hear everyone else’s questions and their answers. I took the whole thing as a long interview and decided to answer everyone else’s questions in my head too. I think at times it will have looked like I was itching to answer the questions when it wasn’t even my go, I got the opportunity at one point too (and I was right, always a More >
Mostly racing news.. again
0March 31, 2011
Yesterday saw rounds 7+8 of the BUKC at Clay Pigeon Raceway. Situated between Yeovil and Dorchester it was one of Jenson Button’s local tracks for karting when he was growing up in Frome. Unfortunately the weather was miserable all day. I went out in my solo race to a very wet track, with drizzling rain. Contrary to my normal lack of ability in the wet I was able to keep it on the track for the whole race and secured 17th out of 36. It must be all the practice in the wet! With it being my best result so far I was pretty happy. There were quite a few faster guys behind me, but they paid the price of pushing too hard, and they all span off at least once.
The weather didn’t improve for the endurance races in the afternoon, and a couple of laps into my stint it started raining heavily. The lack of grip was baffling and the visibility was even worse. With my visor down I had no chance of seeing any signals from the pit lane or reading the time into the race. Since I didn’t want to miss my stop I was having to raise my visor every time I went down the main straight. This wasn’t ideal as I would get a soaking in the face every time!
After spotting the signal to come in, our next driver went out for the middle half hour stint, with me to return for the final 15 minutes. He had a few off track excursions but we weren’t running too bad. When I headed out for the last stint the fog had closed in massively. I headed towards the first corner and was unable to see far enough ahead to More >
Some time to relax, what?
0March 23, 2011
It seems that the chaos that was going on in my previous posts is dieing down. It was mostly Uni stuff, so it’s great that it’s out of the way now – for a while at least. The Java assignment got handed in on time and without any major issues, so our group just has to wait and see how well we scored. We had to perform a group presentation in our tutorial to show what our program could/could not do, and discuss how the project went. Although we had one group member missing, it went well and people seemed reasonably impressed!
I also had an assignment to write a CV and covering letter as a part of my “Personal and Professional Development” module. I spent a fair amount of time working on this trying to perfect it and make it look like the professional kind of document it should be. I’m around 90% happy with it but I still think it could be improved. It is harder than you think to try and include everything you want to say in an appropriate manner and in few words.
In my last post I was about to head down to Llandow for rounds 5+6 of the BUKC. The track was wet to begin with, but with none of us being in the first race it had dried up a fair bit by the time I went out for race 2. I had been randomly assigned pole position which was great, although I knew I was never going to be able to keep it – especially in the tricky conditions. After spending what seemed like forever rolling up, the race got under way. I slipped to 2nd by the first corner, but was able to hold it for a good More >
More Races
0March 11, 2011
This weekend sees the 5th and 6th rounds of the British Universities Karting Championship at Llandow Kart Club. I’m unaware of the grid slots at the moment as I can’t find them on the BUKC site. Maybe they haven’t been released yet. Either way I’m not too fussed as they do work out at an average so that all teams have the same opportunity throughout the season. If anything I’d rather start at the back so I can at least move forward rather than drop back, ha! The weather is looking promising, there could be a chance of rain but I’m going to hope it stays dry as it makes things so much easier! Watch my Twitter for updates or come back here in around a weeks time for results.
Assignments wise, my teams Java deadline is fast approaching and there is still a fair amount to do. I spent a couple of hours the other day just cleaning up the code from huge amounts of white space, code that didn’t need to be there and terrible indentation. I decided it would be worthwhile commenting it all at that point too, so I did. We’re now almost there apart from completing the implementation of the load and save methods. Then of course there is documentation to do. 3 full days left on that one.
My XHTML/CSS/JavaScript assignment is fairing a lot better, mostly because it’s easier! It’s now essentially complete apart from a 200 word write up. The write up has to detail the process I went through to complete the assignment. After that I will almost undoubtedly go through all the code and comment it More >
5 weeks left, really?
0March 4, 2011
Definitely time I made a blog post as I have been meaning to do for quite some time now, but simply haven’t got round to it. I barely know where to start it feels like so much has been going on! Anyway here is my best shot, enjoy..
Last thing I had mentioned was that I was going to a BUKC race in Middlesbrough at Teesside Autodrome. The day started pretty wet, and it was incredibly slippy on track. I was given the first race and was a little apprehensive what with only having driven the karts once before, and that had been in the dry. I found myself going into the first corner continuing straight on; it was solved with a fair old kick of throttle but certainly not what I was expecting! The steering wheel wasn’t doing much for me and it was all about the transfer of weight you could get by messing with the throttle. Despite struggling to the finish, it was all in vein as we had messed up the weights. I was 450g underweight, which I thought was a little harsh to disqualify me.
With round one really something to forget about, I was really looking forward to round two. The was track almost dry, and most definitely dry on line. It was a one hour race and I was doing a 30 minute stint in the middle. I was able to climb 15 places, getting us into the low 20′s. I was just about sticking with the leaders for pace, and passing back if I pushed hard enough. It was exhausting work though, and around 25 minutes in, disaster. Some plank decided to wave his teams pit signal in front of my More >