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Worklife / Student Graduate profiles
Future in TV.
Future in TV.There's a lot more than programming to work experience at TVNZ.
by Sara Goessi.
Inside, two Auckland University computer science graduates are hard at work in the interactive programming department, racking up the hours of internship they need to complete their degrees.
David Roos is in his fourth and final year of a Bachelor of Engineering, majoring in computer systems. As part of his degree, he has to spend 800 hours doing related work. He spent the summer holidays working full time at TVNZ and is now working eight hours a week, in between his studies. It's an exciting time to be at TVNZ for David, with the company launching TV on Demand.
"I'm seeing stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about and it's quite exciting to know what's going on before anyone else," David says. "A lot of the stuff I'm doing is to do with Yahoo widgets and the Microsoft Vista sidebar gadgets. They're basically just programs that sit on your desktop doing useful things." (Check out the links at the end of this story to see how these gadgets work.)
It's a world away from the work experience other engineering students choose. One of David's friends spent the summer holidays assembling doorknobs - anything to do with assembling counts towards the 800 hours. Others end up doing low-level soldering work, basic installation work or electrical testing.
When TVNZ sent an email to the engineering school looking for interns, David thought it looked a lot more interesting: "This was a more corporate environment and more software programming," he says.
David has been programming for years, but says doing it in a professional environment has taught him a lot about producing high-quality code. "Anyone can see it," he says, "so it has to represent TVNZ. It has to be good code and it can't be buggy. It's real software that people are going to have to use. It's been a step up for me."
He's also learning a lot from the people in his group, who he says have often shown him better ways of doing things than what he is used to. And it's not all about sitting in front of a computer; David has also been involved in meetings with companies TVNZ is working with, such as Microsoft during the development of the Vista sidebar.
"I thought I'd just be sitting here programming," he says. "I didn't expect to be involved in the meetings and actually talking to the people who are making decisions."
3G to TV.
She's now doing a graduate diploma in computer science, which she says crams the content of a degree into one year. Her eight hours a week at TVNZ count towards two papers and, like David, she worked full time over the summer holidays. When she graduates in June she's hoping to stay on at TVNZ full time. It was Sunny's computer experience that led to her staying in New Zealand when she came here three years ago to further her English skills. "If I didn't have those skills I couldn't have come here," she says. "It's the same all around the world."
Her work at TVNZ currently involves load balancing. As Sunny explains, that's helping the company's servers cope with all the people visiting its website. When lots of users are online, the load needs to be spread out over all the servers, rather than putting too much pressure on one. Sunny tests the servers through simulating multiple users.
She's also worked with David on developing the Yahoo widget and other gadgets. At least half the time, they say, they've worked on the same projects. The variety that Sunny's job offers her at TVNZ is one of the things she enjoys most about working there. For her, computers are about having fun as well as work, and she's keen to dispel the idea that ICT is dull: "If kids think about IT, they think it's just about computers. It's not true. Using computers you can do lots and lots of really fun things."
One of the fun things Sunny is doing at present is learning about computer graphics and picture processing. "These days design is not only about drawing. Most things involve computers," she says.
And she says it takes a creative person to be good at computer programming. It's definitely not geeky: while she and her colleagues are sitting at computers all day, they're also having fun at work, she says.
Sunny describes TVNZ as a friendly, cheerful place to work. David, too, says he likes the relaxed atmosphere - plus the foosball table, and the regular breakfasts and functions that TVNZ holds for its staff.
Once he has graduated, David says he'd be happy to stay on at TVNZ if there is an opening there. But like Sunny, he has varied interests, and his degree will offer a wide range of job options. Engineering, he says, is a good, basic skillset that can lead to a lot of different careers.
Links
tvnz.co.nz
www.microsoft.com
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