Jennie Harding is the course leader for our Software Engineering BSc(Hons) degree at Brighton.
My career path and journey into teaching.
I was training as a nurse and left to have a child. When I returned to work I worked for supporting housing, supporting clients based on alarm call response and was intrigued to see the database system that enabled call handlers to responds to an alarm and also call next of kin or career, access information about GPs, medications, call history amongst other things.
This seemed to solve so many of the problems that I’d seen in hospitals around discharge care, for example people remaining in hospital when there was no medical need. I was hooked on how well-thought-out systems can help people. So I changed my plan from completing my nurse training and took a computing degree instead.
Something I’m proud of in my career
I was quite proud of creating a small app for an eye surgeon to create a path through a treatment plan for a rare eye-condition.
The technology was relatively easy; it was documenting the underlying model that was tricky – he wasn’t used to making everything a YES/NO outcome and explaining why X, not Y in a way that could be used to capture and transfer in-head knowledge to something that worked as a training tool.
How my work addresses global challenges
Computing and systems design has an effect on our day to day lives and on the future. It should be up to all of us what that looks like.
People talk about AI as though it is inevitable, unavoidable and infallible. It isn’t, and we need to understand its limitations.
Advice I would give to students studying computing
My advice would be: do something that are interested in, accept that there will be part of it that you struggle with and that learning to code is like learning to walk – you have to keep doing it until it works.
Published by