Electrical Sponsorship Scheme Intern Review

I've met a load of people from different backgrounds and have been given challenging work, meaning that my experience has been well rounded in terms of work and play. Additionally, as the placement developed, I found myself becoming more comfortable within my office and this made me enjoy it even more.

By my closest colleagues and the ones I worked with, I felt like they valued the work i was doing as it was helping them a lot and my ability to help was well received. Further afield I didn't meet people from outside my office enough to feel valued and I didn't present anything to managers which meant I didn't feel like I received validation from seniority.

I had a close supervisor who was fantastic at stepping in whenever I was stuck on a particular piece of work, but the actual manager to whom I was assigned was too highly ranked to be able to spend much time helping me or showing me around the plant. I didn't feel out of my depth because of the help given

I worked fairly constantly from 7:30-4 ish but made sure I took appropriate breaks in the day so as not to become swamped. I was kept busy by the ongoing project that I was given, which I followed from its embryonic stages up to providing it to customers and receiving bugs to fix

I had my own section of an application to code and as I became more competent through the placement I was trusted with more complex code to manage but at no point was I managing others or doing anything with expensive tech etc. I didn't mind this because I had enough to keep my hands busy without having to worry about others

my project was focused around developing MATLAB code and in my third and fourth years I am required to do a MATLAB project at uni. Therefore, the skills I am learning here are invaluable for at least the next few years, and given how software based engineering is becoming, I feel that I will definitely be required to regurgitate the knowledge in the future

The atmosphere was very mixed, because in my small subsection, everyone got on well with each other and clearly knew each other well, however, the interaction with the neighbouring department was extremely limited and i felt there were tensions between workers. This led to feeling like I was prevented from networking within the office for fear of upsetting a higher balance.

Personally, I was given a well organised placement and most things that I needed were provided relatively quickly and talks and help were well advertised so that I didn't really feel lost. However, I know that some of my peers felt they weren't given a structured placement with any sort of development path to follow

The HR and application process was well run and I felt that they had devoted a lot of investment into ensuring that it was smooth. From within the placement I was given the access to a variety of different training platforms, work related and not, which added to my enjoyment. In terms of one on one training there wasn't too much outside of my supervisor that I could learn from

I will most likely return here for next year's placement because the company provides a good feeling of job security even before graduation and you are made to feel like it would be easy and pleasurable to have a long career with JLR. They also advertise things like long service benefits which are enticing

The social side was a mixed bag that seemed to be very student run rather than provided by the company themselves. Meeting other interns had to be arranged by yourself in a proper networking manner, which provided a nice challenge as other interns were spread all over the place but it would have been nice to be given structured events

JLR has a specific section where you can do activities with external partners of theirs. The range of courses spans from italian cooking in the midlands to waterskiing on the south coast. Each employee is given £200 per year to spend and this filters through to the interns, who also receive the whole £200 even though they are only around for three months