My Global-Roam Experience
Posted on June 19th, 2009 by Joshua Oakes – No CommentsWhile I was overseas in Europe on a three month backpacking holiday, I decided that I didn’t want to go back to university this year. I wanted to do something real in the world of IT and get some practical experience during my final year. I was either in Madrid or Barcelona when I received an email from the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering school at UQ that was offering exactly what I was after. When I arrived back home in Aussieland, I applied for the Professional Information Technology Placement Scholarship (PIPS) and before I knew it I was sitting at my own desk (not in a lecture theatre!) at Global-Roam.
For the next three months I was in charge of my own project. I was given the task of building a system that automated the building and distribution of a report for the National Electricity Market (NEM). After scoping out the project with my supervisor at Global-Roam, I spent the first three weeks here researching, trying to find a tool or API that could put together a detailed report. Once I had found a suitable tool, I started designing and implementing each component. I built a database, two data processing applications, a secure website, and a console application that builds the report. In the final weeks of my project I started to pull together all of these components and after much testing and debugging the system was actually working! There are still a few loose ends to tie up but it shouldn’t be long now before this new product is revealed to the world.
When I started at Global-Roam I knew nothing about the NEM and nothing about the .NET framework and the C# programming language. I appreciated the fact that Global-Roam was willing to take me onboard and was actually looking forward to absorbing all this new material. The guys working at Global-Roam always found the time to listen to every annoying question I had and send me off in the right direction. In the beginning I spent a lot of my own time reading a great book they purchased called Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Fourth Edition (Windows.Net) 
The interesting thing about working at Global-Roam is that everyone is their own boss. Therefore, the company is run not so much by an individual, but by a team of people that collectively make decisions on a weekly basis. This was a fantastic experience, and one that I did not expect to come across.
My time at Global-Roam was very rewarding and was certainly far more beneficial than going to university for the semester. The many obstacles that I faced made the experience all the more worthwhile. I gained new technical skills, managed my own project, learnt about the NEM industry, and experienced what happens in the day to day running of small business. I will definitely recommend this program to fellow students when I head back to university for my final semester.