Trust News

Excitingly two former SJL students came back to Sir John Lawes School, keen to talk to Year 11 and Year 12 students about their experiences of A Level Computer Science and their degrees along with sharing their work experience since.

Hugo studied Video Game Design and now works for a game studio called Ballistic Moon. Matt is studying Cybersecurity and is currently on a year in industry working for IBM.

Hugo, who gained a First-Class degree in Video Games Development at Birmingham City University, is now working as a software engineer for independent games studio Ballistic Moon. They discussed how their A Level studies at SJL had provided a strong foundation for what they had gone on to study at university, an example being an understanding of object-oriented programming which allowed for their swift adaptation to the programming required for games development. A nice touch was Hugo’s side-by-side screenshots of their A Level coursework from 2019 and a game they had coded in 2021, showing how far their skills had developed in just two years.

Hugo also had some useful advice for students, saying that they should “experiment – nothing will be perfect to begin with” and “pursue what you love and find a job that fits”. We then heard from Matt, who studies Cybersecurity and Forensic Computing at the University of Portsmouth and is currently completing a technology internship at IBM. Matt spoke about his enthusiasm for coding in Python at school and how he enjoyed building upon this in his own time, taking on a range of personal projects, such as setting up his Raspberry Pi for gaming, and removing telemetry from Windows 10 to improve its performance. Matt then discussed how he took advantage of the extracurricular opportunities provided at university, getting involved with “Capture the Flag” competitions and joining the Ethical Hacking Society. We were particularly impressed to hear that Matt was employed by the university as a research assistant whilst still in his second year, and we enjoyed seeing screenshots of research papers bearing his name.

Like Hugo, Matt reflected on his A Level studies at SJL, and commented that some of the algorithms he had learnt about then are ones that he now uses most days. His advice to our students was that “the best way to learn with programming and technology is just to play around with it” and that “personal projects are so important”. We are immensely impressed with how far Hugo and Matt have come in the 2.5 years since they left SJL, and are looking forward to hearing about what comes next for them both. The students who attended the event had the following reflections:

“I found it quite inspiring to know how much Hugo and Matt had achieved in the space of two years. It's crazy how advanced they have become and I hope to go that far as well” – Jamie (Year 11)

“I learnt what my opportunities in Computer Science are and that I should practise my programming to get a good career” – Kai (Year 11)

“I found the event interesting as it showed everyone how you don’t need to be the top 1% to get into a job you enjoy. In addition, Hugo and Matt demonstrated the importance of self-motivated projects” – Adam (Year 12)