Railway electrical engineer Review

The internship itself was enjoyable because I was introduced and integrated into the team nicely. Everyone was very friendly and willing to answer my questions whenever I needed help. The graduates were especially fun to work with and the actual work I was doing was mainly interesting and well tailored to my abilities.

Right from the beginning I was given the necessary training that allowed me to participate in manual work as that was an aspect that I told my manager that I was interested to become involved in. From there I was given important projects to work on that meant that people was relying on me to research into and complete to a high standard.

Overall, around ninety percentage of the work that I was given was suitable for my level, meaning that it was challenging but definitely something I could learn and complete. When I needed assistance I was given it although sometimes my manager wasn't always available promptly and with one of the tasks I found myself really struggling and not being given the help I felt I needed to complete it to a high enough standard.

The start of my placement was the most enjoyable for me as I was given a range of different work to do, which kept me busy for the entire day. However, the second half of my internship was more focused on report writing and feasibility research, which was more monotone and entailed a lot of waiting for replies to emails. This meant that I couldn't advance my work as efficiently as I would've liked.

Right from the beginning of my internship I felt like I was given very important work to complete that carried a lot of responsibility with it in the form of high quality and fairly strict deadlines. All of the work that I did during my placement was needed for us by my manager in the bigger picture of that particular project.

The main skills that I developed during this internship were my soft skills such as organisation, time management and so on. These can easily be transferred into my studies at university and my life as a student in general. In addition to this, I can use the technical knowledge that I have gained from my placement and feed it into my group project this year, which focuses on train signalling and positioning along the railway.

Then general atmosphere within munched department was light and friendly. Although everyone was extremely busy with the work that they were engaged in, people enjoyed talking to one another during their breaks and I didn't feel left out of conversations. Jokes were made often within the team, which acted as much needed stress relief from all the work!

The overall placement was organised really well with lots of different activities during the welcome week, which gave a solid understanding of the different aspects of TfL and allowed me to become familiar with the other interns. Similar activities were organised by interns on most weeks throughout the placement as well. However, the first week of work was a bit untidy as my manager wasn't told that I would be joining the team until quite late and so couldn't facilitate appropriate work for me right away.

I was asked on my very first day what kind of work I would like to get involved in and from my response my manager organised the appropriate training that I needed to participate in such work as it required my presence within depots. Further to this I was given objectives that I had to complete during my placement, thus I was given work and assistance with completing those.

The future employment prospects within transport for London are extremely appealing to me as I have seen the support given and the heavy focus towards developing skills and competences as well as technical knowledge. I have the goal of one day becoming a chartered engineer and from my experience during my internship I believe that such a goal is made very achievable at transport for London, which is why I shall be returning here for another placement next summer.

There were sporting opportunities such as football and badminton. I learnt about football through the fact that my manager played every Friday after work and also the graduates on my team filled in if there was ever a need to. Once I was also invited to play, however it wasn't always possible due to numbers. This along with football were the only two activities that I heard were possible to participate in and I think these should be advertised more.