Two Student Industrial Work Experience placements are mandatory in every NUTM undergraduate degree, at the close of the second and third years. Students may take further optional placements on top of those.
The first one
The first placement usually corrects a misconception. Students discover that the reconciliation, the deployment or the customer conversation they had practised in a controlled exercise behaves differently when there is a deadline, an incomplete dataset and someone else's priorities attached to it.
The second one
The second placement, ordinarily at a different kind of organisation, is where the degree starts paying back. Students arrive able to be useful within days rather than weeks, and they return to their final year with a much better sense of which of their electives actually matter.
It also shapes the final-year project. Projects that come out of a placement tend to address a problem someone genuinely has, which makes the examination considerably more demanding and considerably more worthwhile.
