Profile
Toby James
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About Me
I live in Oxford. Write software by day, forage in the woods (also by day).
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Hi, I’m Toby.
I’m a graduate software engineer at UKAEA. Outside work, I love spending time in nature, hiking, foraging, cooking and climbing. I love to identify mushrooms, plants, animals and bugs – and eat the mushrooms and plants when they’re edible!
I also love learning languages and playing poker. I studied in Manchester and now live in Oxford, which are both great cities for totally different reasons.
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My pronouns are
he/him
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My Work
Simulating plasmas!
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I work in the advanced computing department as a graduate software engineer. My work focusses mostly on developing algorithms, libraries, codes, to enable accurate simulation of plasma physics systems as quickly as possible.
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My Typical Day: Wake up at 7am. Breakfast is peanut butter in porridge and a cup of Rooibos. Cycle to work (40 minutes). Have a coffee. Look at some code I wrote yesterday. Fix it. Another coffee. A meeting. Lunch. Coffee. Write some more code and set it running until tomorrow when I'll check the results. Cycle home. Cook dinner.
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I cycle to work – it wakes me up and is a million times more fun and £7 cheaper than taking the train. At work, a lot of my job involves thinking. So I don’t need to sit and slog through endless tasks – writing good code slowly is better than writing bad code fast. So I spend my time thinking about the problems I need to solve, and implementing the solutions. Of course, I attend meetings, speak about my work, and read and send emails to colleagues all round the world. You’ll never escape that! I like to run my code overnight and check the results the next day – if it’s running while I’m at work, that normally leaves me twiddling my thumbs!
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What I'd do with the money
Work to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds get into STEM
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Spend it on meaningful outreach towards people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
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Education:
Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School (year 7-13), University of Manchester (MPhys)
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Qualifications:
10 GCSEs, 5 A-levels, Master of Physics
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Work History:
I was an admin assistant at an estate agent! And a paper boy. Then I worked at European Space Agency (trainee), European Gravitational Observatory (trainee), now here.
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Current Job:
Graduate Software Engineer
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Employer:
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Physics funded forager
What's the best thing you've done in your career?
It was pretty amazing to work on the Virgo gravitational wave detector!
What or who inspired you to follow your career?
Michio Kaku - got me really interested in particle physics at school.
What was your favourite subject at school?
Maths, and German
What did you want to be after you left school?
A rockstar, obviously. Failing that, a physicist.
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes, all the time. Never for anything awful, but I never did my homework and I was always talking in class.
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
Probably a mycologist, or any job where I get to be outside
Who is your favourite singer or band?
The Velvet Underground
What's your favourite food?
Good pasta is unbeatable
What is the most fun thing you've done?
Paragliding! I signed up expecting it to be something exhilarating but it was so serene.
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I'd love to find some chanterelles in the woods near my house. I wish my squash plant grew more than 3 squashes this year. And I wish there were frogs or newts in my pond.
Tell us a joke.
You'd think it would be fairly exciting to see a piece of an ancient tool used for breaking alkali, but it's a bit of an antique lime axe
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