Emergency Planning Summer Intern Review

The internship was very engaging with plenty of work that was achievable despite my limited experience. Chose an 8 because even though the role I was given within the team was pretty much perfect in itself, I actually applied for an engineering internship. My internship was more inclined towards business and management and the business admits this but a slightly more technical placement would have been more suited to my background of study.

I think this has been the standout positive for National Grid. Right from the word go I received so much support and that continued throughout my placement. I had many people chase up opportunities to spend time with me to help me invest and make the most out of my time here.

I have found my manager to be extremely helpful. I am the first intern he has ever taken on but he's really excelled in keeping me busy and engaged with the work whilst also giving me the freedom to put my own spin on things. I feel that he's worked really well with me but I feel like everything will be a little bit smoother and a little bit more wholesome for the next intern he takes on. No major issues though.

Busy-ness varied depending on deadlines and point of time within the internship. There were some points where I had too little to do and needed to keep requesting work and there were other points where I felt that I was almost overrun. All in all the balance was good though with the extremes only tending to last for a couple of days at a time rather than being an ongoing issue.

I was given a huge amount of responsibility during my internship. The team of four that I joined very quickly became a team of two as two members took long term sick leave. This left a large void in the workload, a lot of which was handed to me to do. The work required regular interaction with our external customers and even resulted in me presenting some work to representatives from our government regulators within my first six weeks!

This is hard to judge as I am yet to fully see the effects of the internship on my personal development going forward. I have however had a lot more experience of interacting with a lot of people of different levels which has really helped me to expand my ability to communicate effectively. The discipline and work routine required with holding a job are both benefits that I will take forward with me in terms of managing my studies. I feel that the specific training courses I took during my placement were either only applicable to the job role I was fulfilling or were aimed towards personal development and long term character changes. I found that some of the training was extremely helpful for pointing out particular potentials for weakness or difficulty in my character, this has given me some long term goals on what to work on personally to continue to push myself to improve. It is however too early to tell to what extent all of this will impact my life going forward, but it has definitely got everything off to a good start.

Very friendly. Everyone was happy to meet me and invest time in speaking to me and making me feel valued within the business. There were some issues in my immediate team which sometimes affected the immediate atmosphere but the office as a whole was very upbeat.

The starting period was really poor. I was meant to start on the Monday but only found out at 5pm on the Friday that the company hadn't received all of my relevant work history information so couldn't let me start on the Monday. Through a very stressful Monday we managed to get all of the information and I stared on the Tuesday. I found it ridiculous that about 2-3 months after my offer, it took until the day before I was meant to start for them to alert me that my start date would change. This meant that my site induction was severely delayed, I had to alter the end date of my placement (as 12 weeks caused it to run until after the start of the new university term) and there were other issues regarding expense claims and access.

The company invested a lot in my personal development, especially considering that I was only working with the company for a period of 12 weeks. Most of the benefits of the training will only really be noticed in the future after the placement has finished but they chose to invest anyway. Lots of recent graduates and industrial placement students spent a lot of time with me informing me of all of the things they learnt during their time and how they would do things differently were they to start again with their current knowledge. All of this really helped my personal development and helped me to make the most of my limited time with the company.

Future employment prospects are fantastic. There's so many possibilities and such a large variety of job roles that I could potentially take on that it's incredible. Plenty of career choices within the company.

Between my colleagues there was no social scene however, between the interns there was a great social scene with us sitting down for lunch every day and spending time with each other outside of the business as well.

The nearby towns are Warwick, Leamington Spa and Kenilworth which are all very upper class areas. This meant that the cost of living was extremely high. As a result, I decided to live further away from work and commute in. This meant that although my cost of living was a lot lower, I did have to spend a lot longer travelling and it made socialising quite a lot more difficult having to get the train in to go to events.

Didn't explore it much, reasonable student population though so I imagine that it's alright.

I was living in Coventry which is a place with very limited possibilities of things to do. I managed to make a reasonable number of friends during my internship but it was a long shot from blowing me away with the number of possibilities.