UK (Cardiff Metropolitan University) Graduating with awards and landing my first job with Software Engineering at Cardiff Met

Hello, my name is Lakshima. I was born and raised in Bahrain, a small country in the Middle East. However, my ethnicity and nationality are Sri Lankan.

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have a desktop computer. I would play games on it all day. I was creative, very curious and I loved to explore things, and this spurred my interest in working with computers. During my A Levels, I studied Multimedia and Web Technology which gave me a taste of web development and programming. I did well in the subject and thoroughly enjoyed learning to code. I became the school’s topper and earned a merit award in my A Level result outcome.

Despite this, I was initially put off studying computer science or software engineering at university. I thought that I needed to be a maths whiz, so I doubted myself and didn’t believe I could do an actual degree in something that looked so complex at the time. Luckily for me, I had a great female influence already working in tech who told me otherwise, and that was all I needed to hear.