Power Academy Placement Student Review

I felt that while I learnt a lot from where I was and much of it was interesting there were times I had nothing to do and none of what I learnt will help me in my degree in September.

The work I was given was not always challenging but the importance of what I was doing was always explained, so I was always doing work that had a point.

We had a range of people avaliable to us. There was a person in our department and a person supervising the group project. Everyone was really approachable and would every now and then check we were okay, particularly at the beginning.

There were points where I was effectively 'creating work' while waiting for people. The advantage of having a self contained project as well as being in a department was that I planned to have nothing to do and kept 'backup work' that generally stopped me from being bored.

We quiet heavily supported so our respoinsibility was limited in some ways. However it was possible to find away of gaining more responsiblitiy, for example I arranged a site visit.

I always feel that even in the most mundane activty there is something to learn or a skill to be enhanced. However I was not really involved in anything directly related to my degree, I had to keep looking for technical documents and people with technical expertise to talk to. I did have the opportunity to remind myself of some of the 'soft skills' I hadnt had time to use for awhile.

Everyone in the office was very welcoming, particularly in the department. We were also included in the invites to all the things organised by the 'younger' people in the office.

I was surprised, this was well organised for National Grid, it that it was clear from the begining what we were meant to achieve and how were going to go about doing this. We also had PPE avaliable on arrival. However, we did not have working computers for a week and it took alot of effort for some one to sort that out!

The people in the company at a small level spent a lot of time sitting down explaining to us. However, from a top down level we did not attend any training days or encouraged to do any personal development. Any personal development opportunities I created myself through actively looking (they were also quite hard to find/ organise)

There are opportunities avaliable in terms of Graduate Schemes, however the impression I get from the buisness is many people get to a point and then stop moving up the 'career ladder. I also have the impression from friends I could achieve more technically else where

All the placement lived together, which I guess can make it hard, as living and working together can get uncomfortable, particularly when you dont know people that well. We managed as a group to make our own entertainment, when we first moved into the house we had no tv, no interent, no games. That was boring.

Thankfully it was quite cheap, we were living in student accomodation that would have otherwise been empty over the summer so he was quite happy with relatively low rent.

I went home every weekend, so I cant really comment on this.

We were offered the opportunity to go to some of the sports clubs and to join people at the pub some times after work. People were very inclusive.