Anja Ram (BEng Biomedical Engineering) scoops the Dean’s Award for Professional Excellence.
Published (Updated )
Now in its fourth year, the Dean’s Award for Professional Excellence was set up by the Professional Liaison Unit (PLU) and seeks to recognise students who have produced excellent work during their placement year.
The final year student who spent a year at pharmaceutical company Roche, credits her love of coding as the reason for her success.
Anja said: “As a business operations intern, my main job was to use programmes like Data Studio to create analytics. Coding was also a big part of the role, as I was building web pages from scratch using python, which is a general language for code we learnt on my course.
“A real challenge of the role was that I had to learn a completely new coding language called VBA. This was completely new to me, so I used a lot of online tutorials and researched to show me the ropes.
“I love to code, it feels like you’re learning a new language and actually talking to machines. The feeling of satisfaction you get from completing a sequence is like solving a riddle or puzzle!”
Anja who received her award from Professor Raj Roy, the Dean of School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, says that all students should consider enrolling on placement years.
Anja said: “I’m so proud to win this award. It is great to have this type of experience available to us as internships gives us something different to what we learn in class.
“Being at university is very different to being full time employed, so it is important that students have these opportunities to gain that experience, as that will be vital to securing a job.”
Last year the PLU placed 200 students from the School of Mathematics, Computer-Science Engineering across all schemes including, professional pathway, postgraduate and undergraduate internships.