Civil Engineer -Highways - Intern Review

I enjoyed my internship with Arup, the team I was working with in highways were good fun and sociable, as well as being highly competent and successful. From the start I liked and was on board with the company ethos of always striving to be the best. I enjoyed my time more towards the end of my internship, when I had become more settled into the system of work and better friends with the team in the office.

The team did a good job of making me feel welcome within the office outfit. I always felt confident in asking for help when I didn't understand something and towards the end of my internship I was trusted with my own sections of large projects to complete. With that said there were times within my first two weeks where I felt isolated and alone within the office.

I always felt fine asking questions of people within the office and had great support from my supervisors. If I was being asked to do a task which was completely new to me, my supervisor would happily take time to sit and explain what was required. This was especially helpful in the first month while I was getting used to the systems of work.

Particularly for the first month of my internship, I found I spent quite a lot of time sitting with nothing to do. I prefer to be busy than have nothing to get on with and would start to feel awkward continually asking my line managers for my next job. However this did improve towards the end as I was trusted with larger pieces of work to complete.

Early on in the internship I felt I was being given tasks which did not carry a lot of responsibility within them. However I feel this can be expected as I was new to the office. In the last few weeks of the programme I was given tasks which held more weight. Arup have a system of working which means that all work has to be checked/approved by 3 people, meaning that responsibility is always shared anyway.

The skills I have learnt will be very useful in the final year of my degree. Especially those in setting out a new project and in sourcing and storing information. The technical and design skills I have developed will definitely help me if I want to pursue a career in civil engineering after university.

The office was a fairly young for what I have experienced in engineering companies and so I could relate to a lot of the team. Over my summer there we had a couple of large social events put on for the team which were good fun, there was also a chance for me to get involved in playing sport for the company/office team. The guys in the team would usually invite me out for drinks on a Friday after work, which I found invaluable in getting to socialise with the team and with people from other teams in the company office. The only thing that disappointed me was that people seemed to eat lunch at their desk and would not use a lunch period to socialise a lot with each other, at the start of my internship this made me feel awkward.

The internship was organised brilliantly and they were flexible with my interview time, (I was abroad during the interview process and they were happy to arrange a Skype interview.) However again I felt as if there was nothing prepared for me to do during the first month of the internship, I was hoping that there would be more of a section of a project for me to work on in the beginning, rather than having to ask for smaller side-jobs all the time.

The people in Arup were willing for me to learn as much as I could about the company and the procedure of working. I was trained in using technology and programs both which i had seen and used before and those which were completely new to me. From seeing new full-time starters who joined during the course of my internship I would say that I was treated exactly the same as if I had been startign full time at Arup.

Especially in the office I was working in, there was a lot of new projects coming in and a lot of expansion within the department. Arup is a very desirable company to work at as a civil engineer and Is a place I would definitely consider applying to full time.

I was the only intern within the Highways department, however I did meet a few other interns from other departments and found that a few of them were classmates from University. The social scene among my collegues was really good, there were socials held every 4-6 weeks and a group from the office would always go for drinks after work on a Friday. As I said before the office was relatively young and so I could relate and get information off a lot of people in the office.

I was working in Leeds and I am a student there, so for accommodation I was able to live in my student house. Leeds bar and nightlife is excellent and relatively very inexpensive. The only thing that could have been improved is to have an office more central in the city (however as it was it was only a 15 minute walk to the city centre.)

The nightlife in Leeds is awesome, which I know from being a student there. On a few occasions I was able to go out with people from the office, either as an organised event or just spontaneously on a Friday after work.

There were opportunities to play sport for the office/company team in the evenings and it sounds like the football team do a tour once a year. I got involved in this particularly with the cricket team, however managed to break my finger in the first game I played, which was not ideal. There was also social activities and talks put on at lunchtimes throughout the week, these talks were normally about things within the company, however did not necessarily have to be.