Meet A Mentor - University College London

Meet a Mentor at University College London

Have you always wondered what you want to do when you graduate?
Are you worried about all the talk of grads finding it hard to find work and what it will mean for you?
Do you want to know the difference between working in a bank, a gaming company or a startup?
What technology should you specialise in? Java, Ruby or any of the other countless programming languages?

Now is the chance to find out. You may well have heard the buzz about the Meet a Mentor events - this is our fourth event open to all students.

This is a chance for you to meet a variety of senior developers currently working in the industry; you will get a chance to listen to their stories and even ask them questions. It will be a 'speed dating' style event in groups of 5-8 with each mentor having 10-15 minutes to tell their story and share their experiences in the industry. We have an amazing line up on presenters, everything from startups to the financial and media industrys, open source enthusiasts, senior developers, entrepreneurs and CTOs. You will also find an experienced recruiter who will be able give you advice and answer your questions regarding your career options, the software industry, job applications and different job positions.

After event refreshments at 'Hotel Ibis' are being kindly sponsored by 10gen (http://www.10gen.com/)

Sign up now to be guaranteed a place at this event.

Here are a few of the Mentors that you can expect to meet:

Mike Burton has a BSc in Computer Science degree from Loughborough University (1981). The degree included 1 year working as a trainee at a medium sized software house, Systime. After graduation Mike worked at Systime for a further 18 months, gaining a lot of good coal-face/ seat-of-the-pants experience. Mike then spent 18 months at another software house BIS, leading a small team.
From '84 Mike spent 5 years contracting, before starting his own consultancy business. This involves concurrent activities on projects for a variety of clients:- Developing software, usually fixed-price projects, covering the entire lifecycle.- Consultancy- Training
Since 2004 Mike has worked with Java, JSF, Hibernate, JBoss Seam, Spring, Swing and related technologies (Maven, Ant, SQL, JDBC...) plus some PHP and Unix/ web-hosting. Mike's "community work" involves giving talks to various IT groups, and recent involvement with the Apache Isis OSS project.

Alex Florescu studied Computer Science at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he received a "magna cum laude" Bachelor of Science in 2010 and a Masters of Science in 2011. Alex has done research with a focus on "end-to-end verifiable voting systems" and accessible voting systems. During his university years, Alex was also a participant and later a coach for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Alex now works as a software developer for Goldman Sachs. You can follow his ramblings on his blog at www.florescu.org or on twitter @flor3scu.

Samir Talwar is a developer that's very focused on doing things the "right" way—building software that is a joy to use as well as simple to develop and maintain. Samir has been in the financial industry for a year and a half, but before that, was freelancing as a web developer throughout sixth form and university.

Craig Silk is a software engineer working at a development house in London where he works on large ecommerce platforms for companies such as 02. Previous to this he took a year out of University to work as an intern at Accenture building a large order management system for Vodafone, after finishing university he rejoined Accenture as a contractor where he managed the continuous integration and build systems for a project at Virgin Media. Craig is a strong advocate of open source technology and its use both at home and in the workplace. He firmly believes that open source involvement, internships and networking are a powerful combination that make graduates stand out from the crowd and helps ensure success when looking for well paid and technically challenging work after University. Craig plans to start a part time masters degree in Computer Science towards the end of the year.

Chris Lord is a mobile platform engineer, working at Mozilla on Firefox Mobile. His previous experience includes working at a start-up on open source, mobile-focused user interfaces, and working at Intel's Open Source Technology Centre.

Directions and location information:

Venue: University College London - The evening will take place in 3 rooms (Foster Court 101, 130 and 215).

Foster Court is found in Malet Place, off Torrington Place, WC1E 6BT. Turn into Malet Place opposite Waterstones, walk through the big gates and Foster Court is about 50 metres on the right. The rooms should be fairly easy to find.

See here for map http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=FOSTER+COURT@51.5237,-0.1326&ie=UTF8&ll=51.5237,-0.1326&z=16

Tube: Russell Square – Piccadilly Line, King’s Cross St Pancras - Northern (Bank Branch), Piccadilly, Victoria, Hammersmith & City, Circle, and Metropolitan Lines, Euston – Northern (Charing Cross and Bank Branches), and Victoria Lines, Goodge Street – Northern Line

After the event: We will head to 'Hotel Ibis - London, Euston, St Pancras' -3 Cardington Street, London, NW1 2LW - for networking and further informal discussion. http://www.ibishotel.com/gb/hotel-0921-ibis-london-euston-st-pancras/location.shtml

After event refreshments at 'Hotel Ibis' are being kindly sponsored by 10gen (http://www.10gen.com/)