Sabrina Singh

"Being an Influencer helps with my work because I spend a lot of my day interacting with different people, and trying to explain to them how to fix their problems. Because I work with people all over the world, often I can't see them face-to-face, and this can make it harder to communicate. Being able to explain things clearly, and convince them that I know what I am doing is important, and helps me to do my work more effectively. I need to be detail orientated to spot problems in the databases. I often have to look through lots of messages about each database to spot the problems, and being a Quality Controller means I am always looking for ways to challenge the current methods we use.Being adaptable like a Manager also helps in my job, as what I do each day often changes, and I need to be able to solve lots of different types of problems as best I can."

"About half of my job is dealing with databases when things go wrong with them. I am part of an incident response team which means when other teams have problems, they call us in and we work out what is wrong and try to fix it as fast as possible. The other half of my job is trying to prevent these incidents happening in the first place, by looking at what common problems teams have and seeing how I can stop them happening at all. I work in a bank so most of what I do is to support the financial side of the company - I don't have as glamorous a job as some of the traders for example, but I really enjoy the atmosphere, and I work for a company that has offices in lots of different countries, so I work with people in America and India most days. My starting salary is a little higher than others at £50,000, but that is because I am expected to respond to incidents even if they happen on weekends, or outside regular working hours of 9am - 5pm (although I haven't had to do this very often!)"

"All through sixth form I wanted to study physics at university, and up until I had to apply for a course I still thought physics was the one. However, I was part of the young engineers club at my school, and was really enjoying the projects and competitions we did. The final one was making a remote control car, and I enjoyed it so much I actually decided to do engineering at university instead. I originally thought I would do aerospace engineering, because then I could work on rockets and other space-related projects, but two years into university I found I enjoyed bioengineering much more. Bioengineering focuses on developing medical devices such as stents, or looking at nature and seeing how animals and plants might be able to inspire new inventions. During university, I had a friend who did the same course as me but was applying for technology jobs at banks, I decided that if they could apply then I should too, and I ended up getting an internship that summer. At the end of the internship I was offered a job with Morgan Stanley, and I had enjoyed my summer interning as a software engineer so much that I said yes to coming back."

"I am a big fan of sport, and I have been kickboxing since I was 12. I haven't managed to keep it up as much during university, but I have tried to go to classes regularly again. I also really like watching football and f1, two sports my dad introduced to me when I was younger. I also spend time outside of work learning new skills, I love languages but haven't studied any since GCSE, so I am trying to learn Italian through Duolingo, with mixed success, and want to try Spanish after that. "

"If I am going into the office that day, I'll leave around 8:30am and get the train. Once I am logged onto my computer, I spend some time going through my emails. On average, I'll get about 400 emails overnight, so I make sure to take the time to go through and check I have not missed anything important. My team are actually all based in New York, so they don't come online until 2pm. This means my mornings are quite quiet, I'll catch up on any training I need to do, and generally just try get some coding done, or something that requires a lot of focus. Somewhere after 12pm, I will go for lunch - I have quite a lot of friends in the office so we try and go to the canteen together - our canteen usually has loads of choice for food! After lunch, I'll check my emails again, and prepare for any meetings I might have in the afternoon. We do all of our meetings online, so I usually have to make sure my headset and microphone are working. Between 2-6pm, I'll be talking to my manager and the rest of the team to see if there is anything urgent I need to fix, or if there are any calls I should join. Sometimes if there are lots of people in the office that day we will go for dinner together after work, but if it's empty (which is most days!) I'll head home about 6pm. "

"At A-Level I studied Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I studied a Masters in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. While at university, I did several internships with Thales and Morgan Stanley, all focused on software engineering. Officially, I studied bioengineering at university but I did some courses on aerospace, mechanical, civil and electrical engineering, so a wide range! Since graduating in July 2021, I have been working at Morgan Stanley, where I was on their graduate scheme until November. Now I work as a database administrator in their enterprise team."