Systems Architecture Software Engineer Intern Review

For me it was a very enjoyable experience working here at ARM, it is a very friendly environment; I worked within the ATG department and I found people here to be particularly enthusiastic and very knowledgeable which has allowed me to pick up a lot more skills than if I probably would have otherwise.

I worked within a small team made up of only senior architecture engineers (there were other interns alongside me); the team were prepared to discuss with me the work I had completed in depth and explain areas that might not have been fully relevant to me but I was still interested in, this made me feel like a more permanent and valued staff member.

It was the first time that my line manager had managed any interns, however despite this Arm provided him with good training and he knew exactly what needed to be completed and when; the HR department have a good scheme for ensuring the continued development of employees and I believe that us interns just run a condensed version of that scheme.

My internship consisted of 2 main tasks, each of which gave me plenty to keep busy with; part of the nature of the first task involved running many tests on the computing cluster, so whilst running those I chose to find ways to keep myself busy (improving what I had been working on), but again that is not anyones fault really.

From the get go I was given a high level of freedom and responsibility (ownership) on the task that I had chosen to work on; in fact my initial results were well trusted and my team were happy to take my explanation of the inner workings at face value. Upon handover there was a code inspection as would be expected, but I feel as though I had sole responsibility throughout.

I am yet to return to my studies, however as a computer science student I have definitely learnt a lot about architecture and improved my programming skills here; aside from this I have gained a wealth of experience working with posix tools that I wouldn’t have gained anywhere else easily – I think these should apply across to my final year project very well.

My office was split between two different departments, which I feel provided a nice balance; the atmosphere was fairly relaxed and there was an office tradition of bringing in cake to share almost daily it seemed (including a special ‘cake’ email alias that people would send descriptions of their cake to for the office to read haha)

I felt the internship was very well organised both form my team and at the higher level; there were regular intern talks given on various topics, many weren’t of interest to me but I attended a couple on hardware and architecture. HR were quite happy to extend the length of my contract after I had been working a while which was useful to me.

I think that the intern talks that were offered must have been quite a large investment as they required getting an experienced staff member to prepare and give a presentation as well as letting interns take time out of their work to attend. There was a system for tracking our progress towards self set goals also, although mine didn’t require any external training.

I think Arm is a very special company in that they are the only large hardware designer based within the UK, for this reason if you are a UK student interested in working in this sector they are the logical step. In the group that I worked within they cannot give out purely speculative graduate offers in the same way that other companies can, as each graduate position is for a set role so recruitment numbers need to be exact.

I think that a reasonable proportion of the interns here were very sociable and friendly, many people went out socialising at the weekends and people had a variety of interests behind the scenes. As someone living with family and commuting in to work I can’t say I got the opportunity to experience much personally.

I lived with family outside of the city do I am not too sure of this one.

I have been out in Cambridge previously, it’s quite a small place and there aren’t too many clubs; however as you could expect from a student city there are plenty of young people and it is a good fun place. The offices I worked in are a fair way from the city centre so many people lived a bit further out.

Again, I had to commute so I avoided these.