"If I was advising students about work placements, I would recommend for them to decide what they enjoy and pick an industry they want to work with and even if a placement doesn't stand out, do one anyway as it's really important," he said.

Fergus, a third year student in MEng in Electronic Engineering at Southampton was inspired by his 'A'-level electronics teacher who encouraged him to pursue a career in the subject.

He loves engineering and welcomes the opportunity to learn more maths and science.

His industrial placement was with Qualcomm, a company which develops mobile phone chip sets.

He met staff from Qualcomm at the ECS Careers Fair and was impressed by a presentation by Marco, their Director of Engineering. He stayed behind after the presentation to speak to Marco who encouraged him to apply and when he was offered the placement, he found he was working in Marco's team.

Fergus started his placement in September 2009 in the Radio Frequency Hardware team. He worked on the analogue parts of the chip set designs, so that the company could develop the set and sell the design to the mobile phone operators.

"We had to verify the performance and design of the chips and make sure that they performed well in the phones," said Fergus.

Fergus learned quickly and after his training period, he took on a lot of responsibility.

"It was incredible to look after over a million pounds worth of equipment and within a short time, I was also asked to produce reports and do hands-on testing," said Fergus.

Fergus loved the fact that there was so much to learn at Qualcomm.

"I like doing technical work and I like to learn as I go along," he said. "With a mobile phone, there is so much going on that you would never know every part. It's got as many transistors as a modern desktop processor."

Fergus also liked working as part of a team and was always involved in the weekly conference calls.

He also got involved in the social side of Qualcomm and took part in the 5-a-side football team, went go-karting with them and went to their Christmas dinner.

"That was all great and it meant I mixed with people on other floors and had far more messages on my leaving card as a result," he said.

He is now back at university. The biggest change for him at the moment is that he is in a different year group to his college friends, but true to form, he sees the positive side of this:

"I'm making new friends," he said. "It's a bit like being a new kid at school."

He has started work on his third year project and is looking at 3-D video with a view to maximising compression from the video streams in a way which reduces bandwidth and energy.

In an ideal world where time and money is no object, Fergus would take himself off to the South of France and eat and drink all day long. In the meantime, he is very interested in getting a job working with mobile phone technology when he finishes his studies.