Pillar 2: How can we support a young person who wants to start a career?

[CaptainSifff]

How can a young person start a career? How can this career be built? and then, how can it be supported? Here we have questions like How to motivate people for it? What does a bachelor look like? What is the master? Outreach to the existing RSEs? What are suitable teachers for these things? How do we ensure a representative breadth of domains? Since we foresee the need for ongoing future education of graduated RSEs we see the need to embed them into respective networks

[MakisH]

How can a young person start a career?

Here we have questions like How to motivate people for it? What does a bachelor look like? What is the master? Outreach to the existing RSEs?

An important issue would be to show prospective students that there is actually a potential career, and potentially with some job safety, both in academia and in industry. And I think it should be 1-to-1 compared with the careers of a software engineer and of a researcher. As a (prospective) student, I would have loved an introduction day with professional RSEs sharing their experiences (similar to the interviews in the Code for Thought podcast).

How do we ensure a representative breadth of domains?

I would imagine study programs with multiple electives from courses already offered at a university (see #18).

[mhagdorn]

I am trying to imagine how somebody would get into becoming an RSE. I would imagine that

• after school they decide to study some home domain, say chemistry
• during their course which is pretty wide the become aware of computational chemistry and enjoy the combination of computing and science
• they finish their first degree in their home domain with some idea of what an RSE does
• and decide to go for a RSE master

I think we have been around this loop a number of times. To support this path, we'd need to raise awareness in the home domains and support the lectures there who want to add some computational methods. Having basic digital literacy courses in all undergrad courses would be very nice. But I suspect it will be difficult to get some space in the already packed curricula. We already talked about what a RSE master programme could look like.

I don't think that somebody leaving school will say I want to become a solid state physicist but they'll say, I want to study something to do with physics. Where that takes them is open to chance encounters and discovered preferences. Becoming an RSE is then just one of those specialisation that at same time opens up to other research domains.

[CaptainSifff]

• The master's is tractable -> Hopefully it should generates enough pulling power to argue for a bachelor degree.
• Use that for outreach into other departments