Department of Informatics

Student placements and internships

We strongly encourage students to consider an industrial placement year, or at least a career-related summer internship. A year in industry will significantly boost your competitive edge for securing the job of your choice, while also giving you new skills and insights for the rest of your course at Sussex.

Award-winning support

The University of Sussex Placements teams were runners-up for 'Best University Placement Service (Over 100 Placements)' in the 2018 National Undergraduate Employability Awards — recognising their excellent support to students across a range of work experience programmes.

Industrial placement year

All Informatics bachelor's degrees have an optional industrial placement year assessed as an integral part of the course, leading to the award 'BSc/MComp (with an Industrial Placement Year)'. The placement year is taken after the second year of the course.

We are in contact with a large number of companies in the software development, digital media, and IT sectors — based in Brighton, the south east, London and the rest of the UK. To give students the best chance of finding the right placement, we:

  • maintain a searchable database of placement opportunities,
  • run an online Placement Preparation Programme, and
  • provide individual support through a dedicated placements team.

Our students have gained placements in both international blue-chip companies and smaller specialist companies, including:

  • Accenture
  • Airbus
  • Blackberry
  • Electronic Arts
  • GlaxoSmithKline
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Google
  • IBM
  • SAP
  • Xyratex
  • Brandwatch
  • E-Crunch
  • Gamer Network
  • Linn Systems
  • Master of Malt
  • Mobbu
  • North Laine Solutions
  • RecordSure
  • Sensible Development
  • Skyscape Cloud Services

There are many advantages to doing a placement year, including: consolidation of academic learning; new or enhanced professional and intellectual skills; increased personal effectiveness and confidence; greater career awareness; and professional work experience to increase your attractiveness to future employers. Of the students on placement in 2015-16, all graduated in 2017 with good degrees (1st or upper 2nd class) with more than three quarters of them gaining 1st class honours.

Below are some views and advice from previous placement students.

David's placement year

David Richards'For my placement year I worked as a software developer at Mobbu: a Brighton based company specialising in fast and secure mobile technology for the police, government and security organisations. As part of a small agile development team, my role required me to use a wide range of the skills I learned during my studies and apply these to new challenges and exciting new technologies.

'Working at Mobbu was fast-paced and dynamic, and I found myself quickly working on projects, learning new programming languages and becoming integrated as part of the team. A placement year is a golden opportunity to work with the experts in industry and Mobbu are certainly among these experts.'

David Richards
BSc Computer Science

Jozef's placement year

Jozef Stremen (BSc Computing and Artificial Intelligence) secured a placement with IBM. In this video he talks about the application and selection process, settling into the placement, his experiences during the year, and the many benefits of doing a placement.

Career-related summer internships

Vacation work is not just about making money. Any kind of work experience says something about you as a person and potential employee, and will enhance your future employment prospects. Career-related vacation work does the same, only more so. In addition, it offers other advantages such as finding out whether you really like a particular kind of work or company before you graduate.

Our jobs database contains many internship opportunities, and we provide advice and support in applying for and securing one that matches your skills and career aspirations.

Georgie's internship

Georgie McDaniel'I spent my first summer vacation as an intern at Player Research, a video game playtesting and user research company based in Hove. It gave me an insight into a fundamentally important area of the video game industry that I was previously unaware of and as someone who wants to pursue a career in the industry, the experience I gained was invaluable.

'As an intern, Player Research were very welcoming and encouraged me to take part in a range of roles, allowing me to make a real contribution within the company. I felt very privileged thatI was able to experience first-hand the process that goes behind playtesting: evaluating and reporting on unreleased games to support the design decisions of the game developers. As well as the new software skills I learnt, my positive experience increased my self-confidence and encouraged me to use my own intuition when coming up with creative solutions to problems.

'This will definitely benefit me as I start my second year at university and I feel that it was a very good use of my summer.'

Georgie McDaniel
BSc Computing for Digital Media