Name: Mary Gouseti
Current position: Software Engineer at the online store Bol.com

'While studying for my bachelor I fell in love with programming languages and I wished to dive into the theory behind them. However, I was also interested in preparing for a job in the industry as well since that was the direction I would like to follow. I really thought that it would be utopic to find an one-year program that would offer me both the knowledge that I could use right away in the industry but also challenge me in a research level. So since I had a more "theoretical" education, choosing a more practical master's program seemed like a good idea.

... And I could not be more right! I found my utopia. This master's program deals with everyday aspects of software engineering in a academic and critical way giving you the possibility to catch up really fast with whatever you encounter on your future or current job. In addition to that, you get a lot of research opportunities which for me resulted in one of our assignments being published at the GPCE'14.

This master captures what I think are the core essence in software engineering. You have to team up almost for every project which represents reality; let's be honest chances are that if you want to be part of something big you have to work in a team! Furthermore you will study software engineering from two perspectives the human and the technical... Chances are that you will love one more than the other, for me it was the technical, but nevertheless both are extremely important and the human part is done as practical as it can be.

Both aspects are taught in an equally challenging way and you will need to work a lot. The environment is encouraging and inspiring, the cooperation with other students and professors is really close and you get to learn way more from each other that you can imagine!

After graduating I already had a contract with bol.com as a software engineer. The master helped me a lot to quickly catch up and gave me the opportunity to challenge myself and look for improvements.