OR careers, MSc project, Discrete Event Simulation

Apologies first. I have not been blogging in a long time mainly because I was caught up doing my MSc project website in which there is a heck of a lot of modules to go through and then check to make sure they display correctly. At the moment I have made all 27 modules of the website, now all I need to is sort out display, repeating JavaScript and the most labour-some task Testing. Or as I like to call it "Testing to destruction". The idea of making it fail is more harsh but sounds more fun.

Okay apologies done. On the 16th November 2011, it was a Wednesday (by the way) I attended a Operational Research Careers Open day. This was in Birmingham and started at 10:00 and went on to 15:30. There were a lot of stalls there so to name as many as I can:

• [dstl]
• BA
• GORS
• Tesco
• Hartley McMasters ltd
• RBS
• Atass Sports
• IBM UK
• Cardiff University
• University of Southampton

After browsing the stalls they had a lot of talks from a lot of different companies on what exactly they do. There was talks from Martin Slaughter from Hartley McMaster Ltd on what they did with Vodafone. It was on opening hours and rotas for staff i.e. whether to open on a Sunday or not? Also a talk from Mike Nicholson from IBM UK talking about a case study they did. Next up was GORS or Government OR Services. They talked about how the work is very varied, job security and an amazing pension (better than the average). Then Andrew Long from British Airways Where he talked about the code on an airway ticket and all the different sections which is put together to form British Airways. Then there was a Company I never heard of before that day Tata Steel I presume this is for engineers who describe themselves as mathematicians but I could be wrong. And the very last talk of the day was Tom Hibbert from Tesco who talks about the different problems Tesco faces like perishable good, how much to order etc.

The Careers day was very informative the only problem was travel costs for me to get there by 10.00 i had to pay £70 roughly and to get home i got the cheapest ticket which was around £18 pounds mark. If however they moved the starting time to nearly 12.00 then my forward journey would only cost £18 roughly. Thats the only thing that annoyed me, apart from that well done the OR Society.

For an assessment centre I have to study up on one of four Operational Research Topics namely "System Dynamics", "Discrete Event Simulation", "Bayes net or other decision tree type approach", "Multi- criteria Decision Analysis (or a specific technique from within this group of techniques)".

Having looked at the wiki pages of these I found out Discrete Event Simulation looks mainly like Queueing theory. So I have to brush up on this, luckily I did actually do this in my BSc whilst at Greenwich University with my favourite lecturer Professor Vitaly Strusevich. I have a lot of man love for this guy, a person who actually got me into OR and got me to join the OR society.

UPDATE 13th December
Some links I forgot about. Whilst at the career fair the first talk was from the chairman of the OR Society and he mentioned some projects he was working on they were Green Logistics and ITIS Holding.