The Life of a Placement Student

It's been a little over 6 months since I finished my second year of Multimedia Technology and Design at Brunel University and started working at Ten4 - that's more than half of my placement. It's gone really fast…

Way back in June (when my placement began) I was working on the update and redesign of parts of our custom CMS (content management system). Pretty soon I was making systemic changes like making actions clearer and form fields more visually appealing - these decisions now affect the user experience of numerous clients using the system.

After Andy (last year's placement student) left I was suddenly working on real projects for real clients. Within a month I was working on the front-end development for Will Young's new site. It's great to work on this sort of project - the level of trust and the scope of the role I play in the company are some of the things that make Ten4 such a good employer (particularly for a placement).

Recently I took the initial homepage design for Fearne Cotton's site, designed interior pages, developed it and completed the first stage of the CMS integration. I've also completed the front-end development of a shiny new JavaScript-enhanced voting process for the National Television Awards.

Working on high-profile projects is great but sometimes it's the smaller projects that I get the most out of. With these I can take a more client facing role and deal with the project as a whole (design, front-end development and CMS integration as required). Interacting with clients like this isn't something I'd really done in this context before and it's interesting to see the whole process - another advantage of working in a small team.

I've also learnt a lot about front-end development in my time here so far. Looking back at the code I wrote pre-Ten4 is certainly interesting - without the things I now know about accessibility, SEO and browser compatibility my work was certainly a lot worse!

Much of my current JavaScript knowledge comes from the opportunities I've had to work on side projects when there isn't much front-end development work to do. One of my side projects is Tea Roulette, a simple little app that helps us choose who's making tea in the office.

Knowing how to add value to sites using JavaScript is increasingly important in the 'post-Flash' world because of how frequently it's used. It's an extremely useful skill which I know I'll use extensively after Ten4.

Without a doubt the best thing about working at Ten4 is the fact that I'm truly treated as part of the team, like any other employee. I could tell you a dozen horror stories about other students in my field who are on so-called 'placements' but mine is so different from theirs - I get the opportunity to work on real projects with real clients and extend my skill-set in pretty much whatever way I choose. That's how a placement should be.

It's been incredible so far and I look forward to the next 6 months!