My summer job

I’m 16 years old and four weeks ago I started working at EPCC. I was here in November for work experience which was arranged by my school and, afterwards, I was told that I could have the opportunity to come back in the summer holidays. I’m very happy that I had this chance and took it.

This was my first job and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel as though I have matured and learned new skills such as sending formal emails to adults which was a daunting experience for me when I first started! You may know me as Kostas’ daughter, but you may be surprised to find out the only time I spent with him was in the car here and back! Instead, I was supervised by Lorna Smith, Manos Farsarakis, Mirren White and Alistair Grant.

I was working on adding new content to the Diversity in HPC website with Lorna and Mirren and I have managed to add six new profiles to the website! I am happy to be able to say that I helped to contribute to such an important cause. My computer science teacher is always telling me that more women are needed in computer science and I think that from the website I have learned that there are already so many different personalities in computer science and, for the most part, they have not experienced any discrimination. It can only get better from here!  

With Manos, I was working on creating an Android app for the same website. At the start, this seemed like such a huge project for me as I had no experience in app development but with the help of Manos, I managed to create a functioning app that I am proud of. I really enjoyed app development as there is no better feeling than getting the app running after being presented with a myriad of errors.

I was also working on coming up with ideas for a programming workshop with Alistair and I enjoyed this task as I could put myself in the position of being at one of these workshops, so I could think about what I would enjoy doing and learning. By doing this, I also learned a new programming language which is always exciting. I hope that some of those task ideas will be used in the programming workshop and that people will learn how to code from my tasks. I am also always happy to come along and help!

I would like to thank everyone at EPCC for being so hospitable, I really enjoyed buns and I think it is a clever idea that should be implemented in workplaces everywhere! I would especially like to thank my supervisors for being there to answer my many questions and helping me whenever I had any difficulties.