I am now a proud member of ECS Helpdesk. It was a tough battle to get there… I had to submit a decent CV and convince them at the interview I was the man for the job. Blood was spilt and tears were wept (there were loads of applicants), but I managed it! I’ll be working for a probationary period on Fridays for just 2 hours. So nothing too demanding. My forte in this position will be solving problems in NetBeans and Eclipse.<\/p>\n
This semester I’ve been studying Formal Methods – what’s that about? It’s basically applied Discrete Maths – you use it to prove that programs will do what they say on the tin, except in a mathematical manner. Usually, you will write a program and prove it does what you claim it does by testing for certain inputs and certain outputs. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t test every single possible state in your program, and even if it did, it would take a lot of time. As I’m sure you’re aware, software still manages to contain bugs which are usually too obscure to repeat successfully. It’s better to design it from the very start to be pretty much flawless. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I used to waste just debugging things. So definitely some good transferable skills I’m learning here.<\/p>\n
The Jiu Jitsu training is still going strong for me. All being well, I will have an orange belt by the end of Easter. It hurts like hell sometimes though! But it keeps me in shape.<\/p>\n
I am still fighting for the students’ rights – well not quite, but I am representing my entire year on my course!<\/strong> The Staff-Student Liaison Commitee are eager for students’ views and it seems like they take what we representatives say seriously. The meetings are well-organised and are tactfully moderated effectively by the chairman, Prof Lajos Hanzo. I will keep you posted on any action taken as a result of my participation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am now a proud member of ECS Helpdesk. It was a tough battle to get there… I had to submit a decent CV and convince them at the interview I was the man for the job. Blood was spilt and tears were wept (there were loads of applicants), but I managed it! I’ll be working for a probationary period …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33315,33309,33314,33311],"tags":[430901,430902],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronic-engineering","category-project-work","category-software-engineering","category-southampton-university-life","tag-assistance","tag-helpdesk-formal-methods","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BSCk-9z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1248,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions\/1248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}