Kai Ezz - Great experience with BNY Mellon SETUP program

I've been involved in the 18-month SETUP program with BNY Mellon for around a year now, and the experience so far has been great as I have undergone a great amount of personal and technical growth since my onboarding.

We began with a 2-week training program in the BNY tech stack, which was fast-paced and full of varied activities, including group work, labs and demonstrations. We learned everything from programming paradigms to vulnerability defense to project architecture and had the opportunity to speak to a plethora of senior developers, including one of the world's few Java Champions.

After our onboarding, we were assigned our teams, with who we will work for the remainder of our program -- I work in client onboarding, which is the product that facilitates new legal entity creation with the bank. My role is full-stack, which I love particularly because it allows me to ascertain a high-level understanding of our system, as well as a more granular comprehension of the technologies it's comprised of.

My day-to-day schedule involves SCRUM rituals such as stand-up meetings between the pod(team) that I work on, where we exchange our updates and help each other out when we run into issues. I also work every day on my assigned tasks, which as mentioned can be either front-end or back-end changes. I've worked with all aspects of the system and my work has always been varied and interesting.

Everyone in my pod has a collaborative mindset and I've learned a lot from speaking to them about debugging techniques, programming paradigms I wasn't familiar with, industry practices and much more. I really enjoy working in a team as I feel supported in my role and able to grow professionally.

As I have grown thanks to my pod, I also appreciate the independence and responsibility I have been given to do work on my own and to learn to problem-solve from the ground up. I have had a number of opportunities to add new functionality to our system, but my favourite project was a DevOps contribution. Without going into too much detail, I made a script to automate an aspect of the development process that was time-consuming to do manually. I am proud of my impact on the team and happy to have been able to streamline the development process for my colleagues.

Outside of my technical work, I've connected with many remarkable people at BNY through getting involved in Employee Business Resource Groups (EBRGs). These include PRISM, our LGBT EBRG, and HEART, our disability resource group. I've also connected with other graduate employees or interns across BNY through social events organized by our campus team, and learned a lot from speaking to them. I've found everyone at BNY, whether they are engineers or not, graduates or not, offers an interesting perspective and brings something special to the table.