Rosie Harris

Over the Summer of 2017-18, I was fortunate enough to participate in the SMP Summer Industry Program at SilverRail – a rail technology company. Going into the program, I was unsure of what to expect as I was would be working in software despite having very little coding experience. As it turned out, I loved being able to apply my maths degree in a software context, and the experience I gained from this program was incredible.  

SilverRail’s mission is to provide technical solutions for rail companies. A big part of what they do is journey planning, so for the internship project I was able to work on developing a journey planner that created routes for tourists. For this journey planner we replicated a novel algorithm which develops optimal routes between tourist landmarks in a city while integrating public transport. This project was so satisfying to work on - I was able to apply a lot of the knowledge I gained from my maths degree while also learning a lot of concepts that were completely new to me. We ended up developing a trial app for this journey planner which was awesome, it was so rewarding to physically see how people could use my work.    

I could not recommend this program enough! The environment at SilverRail was so encouraging and engaging, the project I worked on was exactly to my interests, and the whole experience was made even better by being able to take it as a course through SCIE3255. I learned far more about what I can achieve through my maths degree than I would have in any other course. I wanted to put my maths degree into context and understand how I could apply it in industry and that’s exactly what I achieved. This internship allowed me to use my maths degree to solve challenging problems with real-world applications, and I am very excited to continue to do this in my career.