Placement

eamoss

Im in NUI Maynooth doing Computer Science & Software Engineering, in 3rd year the students do one semester in Uni and the 2nd on a placement can be a 18 month placement.

At the moment I am in 2nd year so I have a year to plan this and I want do my placement in America its something ive always wanted to do. I am willing to do it on my own but hope to get one or two lads from my course to do it in the same city/state as me.

I got on to my placement officer and she gave me this link to this site but im not sure how to go about it.

Think I will set up an appointment when I go back to uni (next week) to find out what I have to do.

My 1st year grades are poor and I dont know my results yet from my exams from this semester. Im very poor at programming.

How hard will it be to find a placement and if I do get one will I be overwellemed because I dont understand how I will be able to do the work. I have heard that most people learn most of there programming on their placement is this true?

MIN2511

Hey there... I studied Comp Science in school and i did my internship in a company based in Ireland. It's difficult to get into America, i didn't bother. Even though your heart is set at working in the states don't rule Ireland/England. Some companies (Microsoft) send their students to the states, not sure how this work.
Your first year grades don't matter, it's your second year and the first semester of your third year that matters. Did you write a project in your second year? Be sure to highlight that on your resume and also give details on the project life cycle.

Creamy Goodness

i've just started doing work placement for my DIT course. i'm using none of the skills that i learned in first year, it's the core subjects of second year and the first semester of 3rd year that are the most important well for my situation at least.

when you say you're poor at programming, do you mean in general? or just a specific language, there are endless opportunities for people who don't "get" or like programming in a computer science based careers.

for example say you don't like programming but you love software engineering (drawing class diagrams/use cases/sequence diagrams) you dont need the strongest base in programming to do well in this, it's up to the code monkies to be able produce code from your diagrams etc.

you're lucky you've have a choice to go aboard for work placement, i only got the offer of america when i had accepted my current job - which i do like but would of been nice to have the option.

Raskolnikov

Getting work in the USA is hard enough, but if your grades are poor, it's practically impossible. You need to be looking at a 2H1 minimum, otherwise you can pretty much forget it.

I do know however, that these companies will take on Irish students for the Summer.

• Bank of America
• Fidelity Investments
• Johnson and Johnson
• Boston Scientific