Environment Advisor Review

Working at BP has been an incredible experience and I have loved every single day at work. The projects I was given to work on were altered to suit my knowledge in my degree discipline (chemistry). The wide range of work that I have been exposed to is really interesting and I have enjoyed all the projects that I have worked on. The support given is fantastic and everyone in my department was willing to help me with anything that I was stuck on.

All employees that I have interacted with at BP have been friendly and approachable, which definitely helped my nerves during the first few weeks. Even if someone is not obliged to help you, people are more than willing. Everyone treats you as a valued employee and with the same respect they would pay any other employee. There are so many jobs available at BP, I have found that people are very happy to sit down and chat about their job and give you more exposure to what the company has to offer.

Upon starting the internship I was assigned a line manager, a supervisor and a mentor. I work with my supervisor on a daily basis and have daily catch up meetings to discuss what work I achieved the previous day and what I can be doing for the coming day. I report my finalised work to my line manager. My mentor is on the graduate scheme and did the same internship in a previous year, so she helps to provide me lots of reassurance and we catch up every few weeks.

Every single day I had plenty of tasks to get on with, which were discussed at the start of the day with my supervisor. About half of every day was filled with various meetings for the projects I was involved with, so time had to be managed efficiently in order to still complete my work and daily tasks. My supervisor always made sure that I had tasks to get on with, but not so much that would result in me working overtime, staying late or working weekends.

I was given quite a lot of responsibility on the projects that I was working on. I liked the level of responsibility as it felt like the work I was producing was impacting the business and I was doing worthwhile tasks. The responsibility throughout the internship has slowly increased as my confidence has increased, so at the beginning I was not given as much so not to overwhelm me.

The entire internship has been a massive learning curve, not only in my technical knowledge gained but also in the skills that I have developed. There are constant opportunities to undertake training, so I took the opportunity to learn some new software that ended up improving my final product on a project. Confidence was a key issue of mine before starting the internship, but through the success of my projects and organising meetings and completing various presentations to teams, my confidence has vastly improved. This will greatly help my performance during my Masters degree this coming academic year.

In my particular department, a lot of people work from home fairly regularly. We get every other Friday off work, but the Friday that we do work is particularly quiet. Most days however the office has a nice atmosphere, there's a free coffee area so a lot of people grab a coffee for a quick catch up. My department also has little weekly events, like cake Wednesdays. It's the little things that make the office a nice place to work.

I was rather unfortunate with the run up to starting the internship. All the other interns found out which office in the UK they would be placed at over a month in advance of starting. However I only found out 2 weeks before the start date, this was particularly stressful to go through while also completing final year University exams and commitments. BP provide some support with regards to accommodation for the internship period, however this was insanely expensive (being in London) and most of the interns could not afford this. Most interns ended up grouping together and renting houses together in the local area. Once I started the internship, it was organised very well and had no more hiccups.

I had access to the online training database for BP and could undertake any training that I wanted. So I completed various training courses in order to further understand my projects and to get the most out of them. Some of the interns in other disciplines got the opportunity to visit other offices not just around the UK but also abroad around Europe.

Towards the end of the internship period you undergo a final review meeting in which based on how you perform you could be offered a graduate position. There is no set number of graduates that BP take on every year, so be prepared that some years there may be a couple of jobs in a particular discipline but in other years there may be none.

A lot of the interns lived together in rented shared houses, this made it a lot easier to socialise with them. We all arrange to have lunch together most days so get to catch up regularly. The social scene in the department completely depends on the department. My team go out for drinks or an evening meal after work most weeks, which is really nice to see everyone in a much more casual environment.

Being in London, everything is a lot more expensive than if you were placed in the office in Aberdeen. To compensate for living in London, you are given a living allowance on top of your normal salary which helps a lot. Whenever I go out in the evening with my team, they share the cost between them which greatly helps out my expenses! The pay is very good for an internship so struggling for money isn't applicable and I have managed to save the majority of my salary.

Being in London the nightlife is pretty good and everything is easily accessible. I am staying in Richmond so most nights I will be out having casual drinks in Richmond with friends or work colleagues, there are plenty of places to go. You just need to be cautious of the prices and aware of how much you are spending.

There were several intern committees that you could get involved with if you wanted to, whether they were organising talks or competitions or social events. There was always lots going on and the intern events tended to link up with the graduate events so we got to socialise a lot with the graduates.