Teaching And Learning Portal

Boris Dosen, a third-year Electronic and Electrical Engineering student at UCL, was recently awarded a year-long internship at Cisco Systems’ headquarters in San Jose, California. In the first of a series of blogs, he explains how the situation came about.

Image: Students on the Cisco International Internship Programme 2013 by the Golden Gate Bridge.

Back in May, I knew what my plan was for the summer: go to Montenegro, visit my parents, do some travelling around Europe, come back to London in July, start my summer job and be a volunteer at the Olympic Games. Actually, I had my five-year plan all worked out, but let’s not go into details.

I did go to Montenegro, and I did visit a friend in Rome, but while London was being an awesome Olympic Games host city, I was settling down in San Jose, California. Long-term plans DO NOT work!!

Cisco US decided to start a collaboration with UCL and the University of Kent and offer an amazing work experience programme to their students. Most students are placed within Cisco’s IT department, although I personally work with the Marketing team in charge of cisco.com. Cisco covers the flights, the rent and it’s a paid internship, so it’s a sweeeeeet deal.

So what was the process of getting the internship? One day, while I was doing some really serious thinking about my favourite thing in the world – chocolate – I noticed an email about the internship. I sent my CV and a cover letter (which I specifically made for this purpose; recycling not suggested). Universities internally review these and suggest students to Cisco.

Several months later, in the middle of the exam period, I got a call from Cisco. I think I sounded a bit too excited over the phone. I blame all those litres of coffee.

I had a WebEx interview scheduled. As an aside, WebEx is Cisco’s video conferencing collaboration tool (I would normally say that WebEx is like Skype for business, but here at Cisco, we do not like the S-word, so I am not going to). The interview was quite fun.

In a couple of days, I got an email with an offer. California, here I come!!!

To be continued...  

Boris Dosen is one of three UCL students participating in the Cisco International Internship Programme 2013. The Teaching and Learning Portal will be publishing regular blogs from Boris and his fellow UCL interns, Paris Andreades and Amna Asghar, throughout their year in San Jose.

To find out more about Cisco’s internship programme and the students’ experiences of it, visit their blog.