Postgraduate Student Profiles

Siqi Li took the MSc Informatics programme after studying for a BSc in Computing Science from the University of East Anglia in 2007. Since graduating he has been working as a web developer.

"After I obtained my first degree I decided to carry on my studies in the field of web-based information technology, with a view to working towards one of a wide variety of careers in the IT industry. I choose to study at the University of Manchester because I had planned to work in the UK after studying and the university has strong connections with a number of famous companies such as IBM, Google and Microsoft.

The emphasis on the course is improving the ability to self-study. One of my course directors said that "what you can learn from the university is always limited but the university teaches you how to learn more". I found this to be true as I learned php (a popular programming language) after I graduated, and I now use it every day.

I developed my self-study skills whilst working on my MSc dissertation, for which I researched the project "Multi-thematic Crowd Simulation", supervised by Toby Howard, investigating how people built the simulation in the past. The thesis presents several tables of data to evaluate the efficiency of existing methods and frameworks and explore how they can be improved to give better performances.

Since graduating I've been working as a web developer for a firm called Meantime IT Ltd, which provides professional web-based IT service to support clients' business. Whilst studying I read a number of examples which gave me an insight into finding better solutions to computing problems. The "System Analysis and Human-Computer Interaction" programmes supplied a lot of useful and reflective case studies which still remind me of what to avoid in my current job!"