Foundation Enterprise Architect Review

I have fairly been enjoying it. Sometimes the work seems quite basic (filling spreadsheets) and sometimes the work takes an alarming amount of insight (external analysis). Almost every part of it has been a positive experience, and I feel like the work I do will help my department, which makes it more enjoyable.

I definitely feel valued by my colleagues. Everyone in my team has decades more experience than me, but they looked out for me and wanted to help me where they could. People would ask what I was working on, listen for an answer and give me advice if they had any to give.

My manager wanted to give me quite a lot of support, especially in my first two weeks, but through the way the work fell she wasn't able to do this as much as she wanted. But with this taken into account, I was well-supported by her and she encouraged communication.

I have been fairly busy, especially as I have taken on a few extra opportunities. At no time have I felt like I can't cope, or like I don't have anything to do. I also feel like I could ask for support if I was given too much to do.

My team was anxious to show me that the work I'm doing is worthwhile. I took on a few extra responsibilities (chairing team meetings, presenting to leadership) as time progressed, but my work in general bore a reasonable amount of responsibility -certainly more than I was expecting as an intern.

Experience with presenting and independent research will definitely help my dissertation in my degree next year. I have realised how many 'soft skills' my degree fails to teach, such as communication, presenting and working in teams. All these skills will definitely be required in any career I have after university.

Although lots of people worked from home or in a different office, when you did see people there was a good atmosphere (despite working hot desks). People felt like their managers cared about them as real people. But working hot desks makes it difficult to have a particular group atmosphere.

It was pretty well organised. My manager had a clear idea of what she expected from me, and Early Careers was good at informing us of the other parts of the internship. My department does not have a good onboarding process, so it took 6 weeks for me to get CWS set up.

There were lots of different opportunities, which would naturally appeal to different people. I was quite lucky in that there were a number of tech opportunities. The Graduate Coding Club was a really good example of an hour every week where we were able to get supervision when learning Python.

It was pretty good. We made a contact group very early on and people were generally up for doing things outside of work. There was always someone you could eat lunch with, too. Many people were not from this city, so were living alone and away from families, which I think exacerbated this.