"Back in high school I would sit in my room and create websites. This was in the late 1990s. The dot-com frenzy was at its peak and I realized that it was possible to make a living doing what I loved and even get an education in this field", says Anne-Sofie Nielsen, a 27-year old Civil Engineer in Informatics, who has studied Software Technology at IMM. Anne-Sofie Nielsen got her Master's degree in 2005.
Today, Anne-Sofie works at Kapow Technologies in Hørsholm, a leading company in Mashup-Serving, Feed Serving and Web Scraping. Kapow is a Danish start-up company with a development department located in Hørsholm and its main office in New York, USA.
"When I was a senior in high school, I realized I wanted to study informatics and become a software engineer. I visited DTU and was student for a day. After this I had no doubts that this was where I wanted to study. The student environment was pleasant and the university offered all the courses, I was looking for".
I Need Challenges
Anne-Sofie has not regretted making that decision. She really enjoyed going to school there, the teachers were interested in how their students were doing, and the variety of courses offered was extensive and wide enough for her to feel that she had the right amount of challenges and possibilities. Anne-Sofie has always been attracted to subject areas that do not ordinarily appeal to the majority of people.
"I need to be challenged and I like having to work to get things. This is why I chose to put together my education using the courses at IMM that are traditionally viewed as hardcore courses. It is harder to catch up on the more technically challenging courses at a later stage, while I think it is more appropriate to add on the more business-oriented courses later in life, when you have gathered some more experience".
Part of the Team from the Get-Go
In 2006 at the Computerworld Top 100 Award Show, Kapow Technologies won the Best Software Company Award. Before graduating, Anne-Sofie worked as a student help at Kapow, which means that she has been part of the team from the beginning when Kapow was a small Danish company up until 2005 when the company entered into a financial collaboration with the investor Kennet Venture Partners. This made Kapow ready to take on the world market.
"It has been incredibly exciting to have been part of this process. I started working at Kapow 1½ year before I got my Master's degree because I wanted to use my student job at Kapow to test my aspiration to become a software developer. Here I was immediately offered the chance to take on the very things I had learned at school".
Teamwork
"Ordinarily we work on projects in small teams consisting of three developers for six to nine months at a time. The team is responsible for further developing a part of the product that is sold by Kapow to companies around the world. During the beginning of a project we brainstorm and discuss how to best develop our product. Then we initiate the development process and finally the product is tested and adjusted".
"Our product enables customers to quickly collect and combine data from different websites - this is called doing Mashups. E.g., one of our customers uses our product to perform simultaneous searches on a number of different airplane ticket booking sites which offers the customer a quick and easy overview of the cheapest possible airfares to Paris in the beginning of May. Also, we offer private individuals the chance to use our product free of charge at openkapow.com".
"Today I know that I made the right decisions back then. Actually, I am able to directly apply the knowledge I have gathered from all my courses in my work today. I have a vast basic knowledge which is absolutely essential and which has given me a firm theoretical background on which I can build through the development projects, I am involved in", says Anne-Sofie Nielsen.