QA Intern Review

As my first experience of a proper 9 to 5 job, I can say that this internship has overall been a rather enjoyable experience and a great introduction into what working life can be like. During my time here I have had the opportunity to experience many different aspects of the business.

This internship makes you an integral part of the team meaning you are relied upon on a daily basis. This means that you build up a great working relationship with all of your colleagues and you soon become a valued member of the team, which in turn allows you to take on greater responsibility.

At the start of this placement you are given a crash course in how to use all of the programs and systems you are required to know by the previous years interns. This is backed up by a 1 month overlap with the previous years interns in which they get you up to speed and feeling ready to take on their role. There is also plenty of opportunities to talk to anyone in the office if you ever have an issue with anything.

Due to nature of working in a small development team means that the work load on a given day can vary depending on what stage of development the software is in. This means that you may switch between several different development teams to find task to fill up your time.

Due to the nature of this internship the interns make up the backbone of the QA team. This means that the tasks we are given were integral to the smooth running of the team and without our input would cause output to significantly drop. Many of my task were very important to ensuring that a high quality piece of software is produced and makes it to the customers.

In academic terms this placement did provide a greater insight into the use of CFD tool in an engineering environment. However I feel that this role would be a much better suit for a Computing /Computer Science student and would give them a great insight into software development. In terms of soft skills I was given several opportunities to gain several new skills such as being able to help interview potential candidates for next years internship.

In general the office is fairly quite and focused but is very open planned meaning that talking to colleagues is easy to do. Everyone in the office is friendly and approachable and has many different stories and interests to talk about. It strikes a very nice balance between focusing on the work and chatting.

This internship program has been running for many years now and is improving each and every year from feedback given by each years interns. Thanks to the 1 month overlap with the previous years interns meant that getting into this role is virtually seamless and any worries and queries and solved quickly.

During my time at the company I was sent on several training courses, these training courses were provided to get me up to speed with using the software. I was also sent on a DiSC course which tells me what sort of personality I have and how to deal with other personality types effectively. I was also given the opportunity to visit the other offices from time to time.

No offers are given out to return to work here during the placement however, several ex-interns have returned to work here and have taken on more senior roles within the business. The opportunity is there to return to work here it is down to the individual to pursue this role if they desire.

There are opportunity to meet up with other interns or colleagues if you share a similar interest and want to invite or join them for an evening out. This depends on which office you are working at, but for the Nottingham office many of the people live close to the office making social events much easier to organize.

Before the placement began we were given the opportunity to meet up with the other inters we would be working with for that year. This meant that if we wanted to we could share a house or flat keeping the costs down. However I chose to live by myself as that's what i preferred which means my monthly costs are a bit higher than they could be.

Left neutral due to me not being big on nightlife and deciding to live much further out from Nottingham. However if you do enjoy going out Nottingham has load of things to do and there seems to be events going on in the main square of the city every weekend.

There are some opportunity to get involved with some activities outside of work however this is all down to the individual and what interests they share with other colleagues as there is nothing that is officially organized by the company that aren't worked based events in some shape or form.