After he finished his course, Nathaniel spent the summer thinking about what he wanted to do in the future. 

He applied for a variety of jobs, looked at MSc courses to expand his knowledge, and considered a year of travelling, working on a Unitemps summer project to fund this. He says: “The end of summer came around, I had received a couple of offers for jobs I didn’t really want, found some suitable courses which I’d missed the deadlines for, and had spent the money from the summer project on going out for the Euro 2016 games (still upset we didn’t bring it home!) and an expensive weekend trip to Paris.”

Uncertain of what to do, he looked back at the personal statement he’d drafted at the beginning of his undergraduate journey and found he had written: “I hope to set up an independent business offering web design and programming services”.  Nathaniel decided to apply for the British Computing Society and attended a few of their events. He gained professional membership in October of that year and, feeling re-energised, decided to try to make his ambition a reality.

It took a lot of perseverance approaching companies and friends who were in IT before he finally secured some work with a local company, but gradually word-of-mouth and recommendations brought him more work. In September 2017 he started an MSc in Computing and Entrepreneurship. Since graduating for a second time, he has continued working on bigger projects, visiting businesses to offer consultancy and getting more referrals from the people he works with.

Nathaniel is also a STEM ambassador, helping at events which inspire young people to pursue careers in STEM fields and an Alumni Volunteer helping promote Christ Church to prospective students at Open Days.  In his free time, he is also learning Japanese.