As a grad, I’ve got to kind of take the data from the models and show the headline results to the big [inaudible] essentially. OK I’m Brad we’re at Acomb York, and I’ve been working here for 6 months and I do traffic modelling here, traffic management consultancy yes. So we essentially build the base model first which is a model of what’s currently there and we’re trying to calibrate the model, so make the model act like real life does. So we actually draw it with actual roads and once you’ve got that you can kind of start designing where the change needs to be made and see what you can do about fixing it.

There’s maths knowledge and problem-solving from the physics is quite a big one because I mean physics is all about thinking about what’s going on and using your knowledge to work out what to do with it and that’s essentially the same as I’m doing here but not with physics, just with traffic instead, and the data handling as well, there’s as a lot of data handling in physics and that’s the same kind of thing here, but it’s the kind of transferable skills isn’t it, as opposed to the actual physics knowledge.

I did summer internships over the summer of my third year so between 3rd and 4th year with a company called Spirent. Yeah I think that was quite applicable to this job. I mentioned it in my CV, I mentioned it in the interviews and stuff and they were like oh that’s quite interesting. I think it’s definitely good to think about careers through when you’re doing your degree because it’s easy to kind of go “I’m only in second year I’m not gonna finish for another 3 years and that’s fine” but I did start looking for internship summer second year and I applied for about 20 and I didn’t get any of them over summer of second year, so I applied for a few more in third year and I got the one in summer of third year, so if I hadn’t started until third year I might not have got one until…

You kind of get what people want to see in a CV essentially. It’s good to just throw the top things right at the top so they can go “oh this is sort of what we’re looking for” and linking what you’ve done with what they want so that you kind of say “oh yeah, you want this well I’ve done this which has that” so that’s good. My dad once said to me you might apply for 16 jobs, get four interviews, and get one actual job, so if you’ve not applied for you know 16-20 then you maybe haven’t actually got a chance of getting one.

WRIPA is very good. Andrew was a really good source of help for me. I consulted him for help on my CV and application and then consulted him on the first interview and the second interview and he kind of helped me every step of the way. I was obviously quite bad at this job when I started because I had never done it before but now I’m quite good at it and it turns out that you don’t actually need to do the job in order to apply for the job because you can learn the job on the job. Put too many jobs in one sentence.