Scholar Profile – Koshin

Why did you choose Rolls-Royce?

I first heard about UKESF when I started applying to placements in second year. It seemed like a good opportunity as it narrows the applicant pool and would allow me to more easily meet my peers from all over the country. Thanks to my Digital circuit design module I found myself liking the process of designing a digital circuit, writing it with VHDL and seeing it working on an FPGA. Seeing an opportunity to work with this skillset at a company known for having great engineers to learn from allowed me to develop this interest in industry.

My placement

I was tasked with verifying the functionality of a daughterboard for an FPGA and, when it failed, to redo the design with the necessary changes. This taught me a lot about how to ensure that your design meets a specification so that it behaves as intended. The team was very welcoming and were always happy to answer any questions I had. It was very insightful to see how much more advanced processor design is in industry compared to the fundamentals I had learnt at university. Over the year I learnt a lot about industry tools and how to more effectively debug my code.

Advice for future UKESF Scholars

It can be quite overwhelming when joining any organisation, not helped by all the acronyms. I would recommend creating a dictionary of the acronyms you encounter at the back of your notebook as a quick reference. As for getting to know people, chatting to colleagues outside your team as you grab a cup of tea gives you a chance to understand more about how your team fits into the wider company. If you can, having lunch with people outside your team ensures your lunch break isn’t just about work!