Work experience at RS: thoughts and summary

The first thing that I did upon arriving at RS Components was have a tour of the office. It had a very nice carefree atmosphere, it didn't look too corporate, and all of the employees were upbeat and more than happy to answer any of my queries.

My first task was to assemble Pi-Top.

The setup was relatively easy and simple, apart from when it came to tightening nuts. Using my hands was quite difficult for this, especially in narrow areas of the Pi. Apart from this, it was surprisingly satisfying to snap the pieces together and felt like using a more advanced version of Lego.

After having experienced the Pi-Top, Mike Brojak (the very nice person that was in charge of my work experience) introduced me to many different and interesting people. I was lectured on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality, the core values of the company, namely "Seamless, Personal and Progressive", how the company presents itself, how it deals with customers and lastly, there was a huge emphasis on data and how the company can use it. I believe this to be a great thing for the company to focus on considering the data-led times that we are currently living in.

My second day was also mainly about data, customer service and satisfaction. The company paid for me to go to Corby in order to attend a conference with lots of senior members of RS Components who all gave interesting and funny talks all about the aforementioned. I met and spoke to plenty of people who gave me all of the information that I required and were all very friendly. Again, there was a very enjoyable atmosphere throughout the conferences.

After having listened in for a while, I was driven to a nearby RS office and again visited the facilities. It is a huge office with about 2500 employees! I then met the DesignSpark team, who were very kind and offered information as to how to write this little blog. To my young and impressionable mind, the facilities all seemed amazing, with double monitor setups, modern laptops and copious amounts of desk space all being the norm.

My third day was mainly about experiencing a normal day at the office. The first thing I did was talk to Kai, who has been working on an experimental application for five months. Very impressive stuff!

After that, I used the Pi-Top, as per Mike's request to "do something interesting with it". I coded a basic version of space shooters with a program called Greenfoot. It was very satisfying to finally get one little bit of code to work after crashing the program several times in the course of half an hour!

Kai was very helpful, and using his superior coding knowledge, he gave me tips on how to improve my code, which was greatly appreciated. I worked on the code for about 6 hours, and it was actually something that I really enjoyed doing! Getting a genuine feel for how life at the office is was nice.

My fourth day was certainly one of the best days that I have ever had. I got to experience VR, it was absolutely breathtaking! The detail, the sound and the responsiveness of the games that I tried out made the world that I was in feel truly immersive and real. In fact, so much so that I had many strange experiences, although all were positive:

Whilst crouching behind a barrel in VR, I tried to stand up and use the barrel as support. It was to my surprise that the barrel did not actually exist, and I fell forward instead of getting up. Also, getting so immersed in a game makes you forget your surroundings: I hit the wall behind me many times as a consequence of forgetting that it was even there (as I could not see it).

VR is one of the strangest and fun things that I have ever experienced, and this day has encouraged me to try it out some more and maybe start coding for things in VR, although I was told that it is a lot more complicated than 2D coding, but I am not discouraged!

My fifth and, unfortunately, my last day at RS was spent wrapping everything down: I continued to apply the finishing touches to my space shooters game, wrote and summarised my thoughts and experiences about this amazing week, and went home with a gift from RS: The Pi-Top that I had been coding with was mine to keep, which I am very grateful for. I am also extremely grateful for this incredible experience that RS has given me, and I hope to be able to reproduce it soon in the future!

Below are some of my thoughts about the whole experience that I wrote every night whilst at RS: 

Monday.

Met loads of people. Found it really hard to remember everyone’s names. Over lunch, it turned out that someone I’d been introduced to before, I hadn’t remembered.

I can only compare with my mother’s work environment – they have audio visual equipment, large space, conference centres.

Everyone was really positive: everyone really nice, friendly, upbeat, great atmosphere in the office, there was an impressive board about how much was made in the morning.

Gave me Pi-top to mess around with which was really cool.

Tuesday.

One large meeting in Corby today. Mike had organised tickets to get there, and I was lucky to have Anishah, another intern, to travel up with me.

Once thing I noticed, was that adults don’t all speak at once (unlike in class). Adults  show interest in what others say, which means those that speak are made to feel listened to and respected by their work colleagues

The speech on data and how to better use data was impressive. I’d already been told by others in the room that the speaker was very clever, and regarded as a ‘genius’ . the guy was impressive:

He had presence – articulate and thoughtful in the way he spoke; he was humble when he was praised by the person who introduced him; the content of his presentation was itself interesting; so both content and form were good. I would have liked to have spoken with him more.

His presentation piqued my interest because it was about how technology could be put to better use. 

The others speakers were also impressive. Stuff about using data to satisfy customers’needs, using data from existing customers’ feedback.

RS is really impressive, as are the perks of working there: all were given a great laptop and dual monitors and nice peripherals, large desks and lively colours. Reminded me a little of the Google offices, similar kind of vibe, not too corporate.

For the amount of people, it was remarkably quiet. Compared to kids in a classroom that make a lot of noise!

Predominantly males – presume because of the Tech sector. There was diversity, though not as diverse as you see on London streets.

Everyone seemed to get along really well. People were having a good time, humour present, nice, relaxed atmosphere, felt like people wanted to be there.

Wednesday

Today was a more of a ‘real life’ tester of what people like Kai and others do all day. It was quite satisfying to finally get the one line of code that no-one else would notice, to finally work. Took me most of the afternoon to wrestle with.

Kai was sitting next to me and showed me great stuff, he also gave me advice on my coding, like suggesting a loop to code. He was really helpful.

A day of using Pi-Top. Was easier to grab an ordinary mouse and keyboard that was lying around. If I were selling the Pi-Top as an educational tool to code, it would be fine for small projects – but for doing stuff which involved quite a lot of coding, a nicer keyboard and trackpad (well, better to have a mouse) would make the coding experience a lot easier. Nor is the Pi-top the fastest computer around! 

Thursday

A shorter day because of my maths exam, but the most fun day I’ve ever had. An awesome experience. First experience of VR – amazingly immersive, plunging into a new world. Can imagine how it could be used for therapy, relaxing people in a nice environment. Does ‘immersive therapy’ exist already?

The office was like a crazy version of RS office: a horse, a glowing ice-cream on the wall. Made the place look fresh and edgy. I experienced no motion sickness. So immersive, I tumbled as I was dodging bullets – forgot I had a wall behind me and whacked the control against the wall. Then almost lost my balance by leaning on a non-existent barrel.

Everyone really nice and fun.

RS is all about how we present ourselves to the customer. How about how we present ourselves at the front door.

Today’s experience made me think about the impact and use of VR. It’s an odd thought that you could be a person lying in a comatose state and actually spending all your life living in a virtual world.

Friday

A coding day today at RS. Basically, “play with your Pi-Top” so I did, and Kai was on hand if I needed help. He started talking about vector graphics – and how you could code stuff with it, but given I didn’t have much time to learn a new coding language, I just ploughed on with what I knew! Mike had a conference to attend, so I had lunch alone today – a welcome break from 8 hours of coding