Central Foundaton Girls' School

Central Foundation Girls' School Sixth Form

Exploring Tech at Palantir: A Day of Insight and Inspiration

On Wednesday 21 February, I went on a tech trip to visit Palantir. Palantir is a software company that specialises in data. As a computer science student, I feel like I have benefitted from the experience of visiting a tech company as well as meeting new people from other schools. 

We started the day off by eating breakfast that Palantir provided for us. I was the only one from my school to go on the trip, so I struggled to find some people to stay with. Eventually I found a group of nice girls from another school. Everyone got goodies: a notebook and a water bottle. 

At 10 o’clock, we were taken to a meeting room, where many people that worked at Palantir and PwC introduced themselves and their journey to working at their company. I discovered that you don’t have to do a Computer Science or STEM related subject to work #at a company. Many employees and the people that attended the trip chose a range of subjects in their education, for example some studied Law or English at university. I find it fascinating how some of the people I am on the trip with study subjects like Politics, English and IT for A Levels.  

After a short break, we took part in a decomposition workshop, where we used our problem-solving skills to solve a difficult problem. Our task was to think of an idea of a software that can solve a problem relating to the fires in Spain. As a group, we needed to consider all the factors that contribute to the problem and present our final idea. 

After lunch, we participated in a workshop about creating a powerful personal brand – from optimising LinkedIn to creating an excellent CV. I found this workshop very helpful because we were provided with some examples of CVs that we had to evaluate, which I can use to create my own CV.   

Afterwards, we had an opportunity to work on one of Palantir’s operating system, Foundry. Using this platform, we looked at how technology can be used to limit bot activity on social media. As groups, we needed to come up with a prompt that can find robot accounts. We had to test it multiple times and adjust the prompt to be as accurate as possible.  At the end, to determine the winner, every group tested their prompt against many made-up data and presented the challenges they faced when making their prompt. At the end, my group won! We each earned a bag and collected our certificates. 

This trip helped me be more certain about what I want to do in the future, and I look forward to the next opportunity that they offer! 

We were so impressed with all of the outstanding students who attended the Digital Skills Day at Palantir HQ last week! As well as finding out more about what it's like to work at Palantir and PwC, attendees practiced problem-solving with a decomposition workshop and had a unique opportunity to actually get hands-on with Palantir software. We can't wait to see even more of you at similar events in the future.  

 Douad

CFGS6 Student