You might find it a bit scary thinking about your future. You might be tempted to procrastinate making important decisions about your future, see figure @ref(fig:schedule-fig). There is a risk of getting stuck in a do-nothing or busy waiting loop. This guidebook is here to help you break out of that loop. One way to breakout of an unproductive loop is to schedule some time every week where you work on personal development and job applications. Doing good applications takes time and you'll probably find you can't do as many applications as you might like.
knitr::include_graphics("images/is-it-just-me.png")
(ref:captionschedule) The biggest waste of time is the time spent not getting started on a project. Your future might seem big and unknown but it's really not as scary as you might think and getting started can be surprisingly enjoyable. New Project? Every time… by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND
How you start organising your future will depend on what stage of your degree you are at
- First year pathway
- Second year pathway
- On placement or internship pathway
- Final year pathway
For second year students at , the live Coding your Future (COMP2CARS) workshops sessions are on Tuesdays at 4pm. COMP2CARS complements the second year tutorials (COMP2TUT) at the University of Manchester and takes place in the same slot as COMP2TUT when you meet your personal tutor. See your timetable at timetables.manchester.ac.uk.
The second year is organised as follows
- Weeks 1 and 2: COMP2TUT, meet with personal tutor
- Weeks 3 to 6: Seminars in Lecture Theatre A, engineering building
- Week 7: Reading week - take a breather
- Weeks 8 to 10: Seminars in Lecture Theatre A, engineering building
- Weeks 11 & 12: COMP2TUT, meet with personal tutor
Outside of that, its a good idea to organise some scheduled time to work on continuous professional development (CPD), particularly the not very scary and actually quite enjoyable tasks of designing, building, testing, deploying and coding your future.
Welcome week, starting 18th September:
- Following from the welcome back to year 2 talk from the second year tutor Ahmed Saeed, a panel of students returning from their year of industrial experience told their stories of recruitment and employment
- Organisations represented included alpine-cars.co.uk, arm.com, bentleymotors.com, cantarus.com, codethink.co.uk, interactsoftware.com, jpmorgan.com, meta.com (Facebook), netcraft.com, ocado.com and recourseai.com.
Thanks to our panellists for answering questions via mentimeter Ask Me Anything (A.M.A.) from the audience about their placements and their transition from students to professionals.
There is more information on Experiencing Your Future chapter @ref(experiencing) and student case studies of employment in chapter @ref(hearing) on Hearing your Future: the Coding Your Future podcast.
Tuesday 26th September at 4pm: Depending on your when you meet your tutor
- Either COMP2CARS: Debug your CV (self assessment) using section @ref(checklist) in Debugging your future (chapter @ref(debugging))
- Or COMP2TUT: Meet your tutor see digital.cs.manchester.ac.uk/student-groups get feedback on your CV
Tuesday 3rd October at 4pm: Depending on your when you meet your tutor
- Either COMP2TUT: Meet your tutor (if you didn't meet them last week) see digital.cs.manchester.ac.uk/student-groups
- Either COMP2CARS: Debug your CV (self assessment) using section @ref(checklist). Read Debugging your future (chapter @ref(debugging)) and Hacking your future (chapter @ref(hacking))
- Hacking, debugging and questioning your future, activities and questions based around chapters, @ref(hacking), @ref(debugging) and @ref(questioning)
- Finding your future, see chapter @ref(finding)
- Exploring your future, see chapter @ref(exploring)
- Take a breather, its reading week.
- Writing your future, , see chapter @ref(writing)
- Writing your future, part 2 of 2, see chapter @ref(writing)