Background: I've applied in December 2017 and initially, my application was simply rejected in February 2018. After 2 or 3 weeks, I received a short and unprofessional email containing punctuation and grammar mistakes saying that I was “accidentally rejected” and have been reinstated. This made me doubt whether I wish to work for the company and made me have some mixed feelings about it, but I decided to give it a shot anyway to gain interview experience. On The Day: This was also their first self-run application day and it was held at a hotel in Nottingham. The interview process consisted of 3 small group tasks and 1 big group task. I began with the 3 small group tasks with 2 other candidates. These tasks were hosted by the current 4 placement students at the company, and we had opportunity to ask them questions. We were also interviewed by two managers at the company and we had to bring our projects to this interview and discuss them. Task 1: This was good and teamwork provoking. The time for this task was divided into chunks, and I feel like we were not given enough time for planning, and rather we jumped straight into it. Overall, I am happy with this nevertheless. Task 2: We rotated onto this task where we had a background scenario but this task was quite convoluted. At first, we were not sure what needs to be done and we were not given enough guidance by the placement student. My other two teammates, who were doing CS as their degree, were also initially quite confused but quickly picked up on it, while I was left behind even with an explanation due to the knowledge gap of the content at hand. Due to this, I ended up working on a smaller part of the task rather than having a bigger role. Overall I feel like this task was inappropriate for someone like me and I couldn't show off my skills or abilities that much, though it was the least liked one by most of the other candidates too. Task 3: The group task here was to write a program following certain conditions. This task was very simple to understand. The issue I have with this is that as a Mathematics student I only have experience with one big programming language: MATLAB. Whereas my teammates were both doing CS so they favoured Java programming. I had to back down and use Java. In fact, the placement student didn't even have MATLAB installed on it when it was an option! I felt that I couldn't contribute at all whatsoever. The use of Java and my lack of knowledge for it held me back. I didn't want to say much since the teammates had significantly more experience than me on it. Overall, this task turned from being potentially one of the best for me to one of the worst as it did not accommodate my expertise. I suggest that Microlise either consider only those candidates who satisfy the overall cohort's prog. lang, or change their approach to this task on the day in order to accommodate EVERYONE. Big Task: The task here was simple to comprehend as well. Our small group merged with several others to create a big one for this task. We then decided to split into three smaller groups for this task depending on our expertise. The group I was in was working on the maths/logic side of the project. My contribution to the task was quite limited. For one, I couldn't really work as part of a team! My work was to do with expressing more complicated functions of the project in terms of simpler ones and making them all work. I did this on paper with no issues, but to implement my stuff we required all the basic things to work which was what everyone else trying to do using Java. They didn't get anywhere in the two hours, hence rendering my contribution useless. During this task, I started to simply give up with the whole application process as this position was very clearly not for someone like me. Interview: I sat down with the two managers and pulled out different projects I have done. I found the interview process to be quite poor - I wasn't asked much, and they did not examine my projects closely to see what type of programming skills I bring to the table. I received only two questions and at the end I felt as if I wasn't suitable/wanted for the job. It took ~3 out of 10 mins and in the end I felt as if I wasn't given the opportunity to showcase my skill set at all. Overall, I felt as if I was barred from showcasing myself to the company and felt like I was wasting my time. There are improvements to be made by Microlise. I hope that they do, so that candidates do not feel like they are wasting time. I do not believe I'll be looking at this company after I graduate due to this experience.