Carlin St Pierre

Being awarded one of ten Computer Science Undergraduate Scholarships in his first year set Carlin St Pierre up for success. The scholarship covered all his first year fees. Since he knew some programming basics from high school, he scored highly on the scholarship exam which meant he was able to work on more challenging projects in his Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences right from the start.

One of the highlights of Carlin’s time at Waikato was meeting lots of new people through his papers and the Computer Science Student Society, which hosts regular events throughout the year – a favourite being pizza nights.

But above all, the internships Carlin did during each summer break were the most valuable in landing his dream job. For ten weeks over the summer break Carlin worked with different lecturers to research and solve new and interesting topics, many of which hadn’t been looked into before. At the end of each internship Carlin presented his work.

The internships enabled him to work with large software systems, and dive deep into relatively undocumented code to solve problems. Carlin learned lots about writing software, and maintain critical applications while minimising downtime. This meant he felt right at home working on larger code bases when he began applying for graduate jobs.