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Coding Your Future: A Guidebook for Students

30 Minahil’s Story

Meet Minahil Tariq, shown in figure 30.1. Minahil graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Artificial Intelligence in 2025. During her study, she did summer internships at the University of Manchester and Amazon Web Services, see figure 30.3. She served as Chair of unicsmcr.com: the University of Manchester Computer Science society. After this episode was recorded she started working in the Virtual Engineering Centre virtualengineeringcentre.com (VEC) at the University of Liverpool.

Minahil Tariq linkedin.com/in/minahil-h-tariq. Picture re-used from LinkedIn with permission, thanks Minahil. 🙏

Figure 30.1: Minahil Tariq linkedin.com/in/minahil-h-tariq. Picture re-used from LinkedIn with permission, thanks Minahil. 🙏

There’s a human summary below of the raw, unedited, machine-generated podcast transcript.

Listen to the episode by clicking Play ▶️ below, or subscribing wherever you get your podcasts, see section 27.2. An annotated and edited transcript of the audio is shown below.

30.1 What’s Your Story Minahil?

We talked about switching from studying law to studying computer science, and switching from studying in the USA to studying in Manchester. We chatted about the benefits of slowing down. We also discussed why The Intern is one of her favourite films and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is one of her favourite books. We also discussed her experience of being a member of under-represented and minority groups, particularly women in computing.

During her study Minahil presented at the BCS Women Lovelace Colloqium at the University of Glasgow: bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org see figure 30.2, (Tariq 2025b) As well as her time at AWS, we talked about her work in IT services at The University of Manchester and the Institute of Teaching & Learning (ITL) with John Roache. (Roache 2024)

Minahil presenting her undergraduate thesis (Tariq 2025a) at the BCS Women Lovelace Colloqium bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org. (Tariq 2025b). Pictures re-used from LinkedIn with permission, thanks Minahil.

Figure 30.2: Minahil presenting her undergraduate thesis (Tariq 2025a) at the BCS Women Lovelace Colloqium bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org. (Tariq 2025b). Pictures re-used from LinkedIn with permission, thanks Minahil.

We also discussed:

  • Interning at the University of Manchester and AWS, shown in figure 30.3.
  • The importance of User Experience (UX) via Simon Harper
  • Why Rewriting the Code rewritingthecode.org and neetcode.io premium are valuable
  • How scheduling was a key skill she learned on the job as part of Amazon’s leadership principles. (Jassy 2014)
  • Her honours project with Jiaoyan Chen on knowledge graphs (Tariq 2025a)
  • Why data science and machine learning are interesting places to work
  • How to balance quality and quantity of job applications
  • The importance of getting feedback from multiple sources early and often on your CV, see section 8.6
Minahil did summer internships at the University of Manchester in IT services (left) and Amazon Web Services in London (right). AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Pictures re-used from LinkedIn with permission.

Figure 30.3: Minahil did summer internships at the University of Manchester in IT services (left) and Amazon Web Services in London (right). AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Pictures re-used from LinkedIn with permission.

Finally we chatted about how we can improve teaching across the University of Manchester, why she enjoyed Angelo Cangelosi’s robotics classes, how more coursework, fewer exams and using hypothes.is could improve learning. (Roache 2024)

30.2 One Book

For her book, Minahil chose Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Feynman 1985) She enjoyed the portrayal of Physicists as playful and sociable, see figure 30.4.

(ref:captionmrfeynman)

Figure 30.4: (ref:captionmrfeynman)

(ref:captionmrfeynman) The book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. (Feynman 1985)

30.3 One Film

For her film, Minahil chose The Intern (Meyers 2015) for the calm demeanour of the senior intern played by Robert De Niro, see figure 30.5

The Intern follows a 70-year-old widower (played by De Niro, left) who becomes a senior intern at a fashion website, where he forms an unlikely friendship with the company’s workaholic CEO, played by Anne Hathaway (right) (Meyers 2015) Decapitation of Hollywood filmstars by the autocrop algorithm of the Wikipedia App. ✂️

Figure 30.5: The Intern follows a 70-year-old widower (played by De Niro, left) who becomes a senior intern at a fashion website, where he forms an unlikely friendship with the company’s workaholic CEO, played by Anne Hathaway (right) (Meyers 2015) Decapitation of Hollywood filmstars by the autocrop algorithm of the Wikipedia App. ✂️

30.4 Studio Selfie

Minahil shared the studio selfie shown in figure 30.6

Thanks for the studio selfie by Minahil 🤳

Figure 30.6: Thanks for the studio selfie by Minahil 🤳

30.5 Audio podcast on YouTube

You can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts including Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and more, see section 27.2 and figure 30.7

Figure 30.7: This episode is available wherever you get your podcasts including Apple, Spotify, Amazon and youtube.com/@coding-your-future/podcasts etc

30.6 Disclaimer

⚠️ Coding Caution ⚠️

Please note these podcast summaries, show notes and transcripts are generated with speech to text software. They are not perfect word-for-word transcriptions. Some speech disfluency may have been manually removed and links, cross references, images and videos may have been added for clarification.