Hannah

What has it been like in your rotations so far. What’s your best piece of advice for new grads?

From helping to develop the BBC Sounds website as it was first launched to the public to working on the EU elections to solving problems with the new system for aggregating and distributing content across multiple BBC products including News, World Service and Sport I’ve had a hectic and fun first year at the BBC.

My advice to new grads would be to take on any challenges you can, regardless of your previous experience, try new things and learn new skills. The graduate scheme is great opportunity to learn in a welcoming and understanding environment where you’ll be given time and the help of expert software engineers to get an in depth understanding of new technologies and their uses in a business setting.

What’s the most innovative/exciting thing you have done/worked on so far?

While in my current team I worked on the EU election code base. In just six weeks our team had to create a real time webpage and backend that would report results to millions of users all over the UK. This busy and exciting task was fast paced and challenging, yet taught me a lot in the few weeks we were given to work on it.

Have you been involved in any team events or extra scheme/BBC related activities whilst on the scheme?

As a STEM Ambassador I often have the chance to engage young people with what we do at the BBC and introduce them to coding. In March I went to Cardiff for a STEM outreach day where I challenged 14 year olds to code robots and race them around a track. In August I was mentoring a group of very excitable 9-11 year old boys for a week as they created and presented an invention to a panel of judges for BBC Birmingham’s coding summer camp. The group were very eager and it rewarding to see how excited they all were when accessing their simple HTML webpage and the games it contains on the internet.

While on the scheme I also have the opportunity to attend conferences. At the AWS conference, London, I was given more of an insight into the serverless technology that each team uses at the BBC. In September I’m looking forward to attending the IBC conference in Amsterdam, showcasing technology used in the broadcasting industry.

Finally a unique and important aspect the BBC offers graduates is the chance to attend courses. During my year here I’ve attended courses on Scala, React JS, AWS and AWS Architecting, each of which have given me a deeper understanding of the technologies my rotations use.