IBM Extreme Blue Technical Intern Review

I really enjoyed my time on this internship. It was very different from what I imagine a standard technology internship to be. We were divided into groups of 4 interns - 3 technical and 1 business intern, and each team was given a project to work on throughout the summer. I found my project very interesting, and as well as the programming aspect, we also had to give presentations about our project, design advertising materials for it, and give demonstrations.

There were a lot of people in Hursley who were interested in what we were doing. We held weekly update presentations to keep people informed of our progress, and these were usually well attended. We also presented our project to some more senior employees within IBM and they made time in their busy schedules to listen to us and hear about what we were doing.

We each had 1-to-1 meetings with our manager every fortnight, which allowed us to raise any concerns that we had, and get feedback on how we'd been doing. We were allowed to work as we chose, leading our team ourselves, which was great, but our manager was always available for a chat if anything was wrong. Each team also had a set of mentors, and they were brilliant - giving up so much of their own time to come and help us or give us advice.

We worked standard working hours, but we got a lot done within this time. There were some times that were very busy, when preparing for a demonstration or a presentation, but there were other times which were a bit more relaxed. There was always something to be doing, and we were generally left to divide the workload between the team ourselves, which worked out well for us.

We were given a huge amount of responsibility. The projects were our own, and we chose how to work, who was going to do what and when, and how we were going to do it. It was a great opportunity, and also a big learning curve.

As I am looking at a career in Software Engineering, firstly the practical programming skills will be a great help, as my degree is largely theoretical and I didn't have that much programming experience prior to Extreme Blue. Also the skills learn from working on a technical team will be very important to me - how to divide up work, how to try and make sure the code written by multiple people all fits together etc. I have also learnt a lot about giving presentations, which I wasn't at all comfortable with at the start of the internship. I'm not sure if this will be useful to me in my career or not yet, but it's a good skill to have, and bound to come in useful at some point.

The 16 interns (4 teams) all worked in an open plan office. Although sometimes it might have become a bit noisy, there was generally a great atmosphere in the room, and it was useful to have people nearby to help you try and solve a problem if you got stuck.

Everything was very organised.

We had several presentations on things like team leadership and talking to the media, as well as a presentations masterclass.

Hursley is a beautiful location, and the people there were all very friendly. After the internship, I was offered a graduate role there, beginning in September, and I am looking forwards to starting that.

IBM provided accommodation for us during the internship at the Winchester University halls. We were living in two shared houses, which meant that we got to know each other well and could easily socialise out of the office.

Winchester is not a cheap place to live, but as we were all living together we could socialise at home without spending much money!

It is quite easy to travel to Southampton where there is quite a lot of nightlife. In Winchester there are a lot of pubs and we visited several of these over the summer.

Several people joined a nearby gym