I was in sixth form studying A Level Maths, Physics and Design & Technology. Outside school I was teaching myself to code, building full-stack projects with Next.js, React and Firebase, and experimenting with the GPT-4 API. I also built websites for local small businesses and ran a phone reselling side hustle I'd started back in secondary school, so I was always building something on the side.

The biggest challenge was balancing applications with my A Levels, since assessment stages were landing at the same time as mocks and coursework. Degree apprenticeships are also really competitive, and because most of my coding was self-taught, I had to learn how to show that experience properly without a formal qualification behind it.

I'd already found that I learn best by building real things, so the idea of working on real systems while earning a full degree made more sense to me than three years of lectures. Getting industry experience early and graduating without student debt was a big bonus too.

I found the Vodafone programme through GradCrackr while researching software engineering degree apprenticeships during Year 13.

I've just started with Vodafone's Cyber Prevent team in the Network & Telecommunications domain. So far it's been about getting to grips with how a network the size of Vodafone's is protected, learning the team's tools and processes, and seeing how software engineering fits into security work. It's already shown me how much bigger the scale is compared to my own projects.

Professionally, I've gone from building projects on my own to working in a real engineering team, which has already changed how I think about writing code. Personally, it's made me more independent: commuting into work, managing my own time and money, and being treated as a professional at 18.

Securing a Level 6 degree apprenticeship at Vodafone while still in sixth form. Going from teaching myself to code at home to getting a place on a programme at one of the UK's biggest tech companies is something I'm really proud of.