Mechanical Engineering Summer Intern Review

I really enjoyed my time at Arup. The office was a very nice and relaxed environment everyone was very friendly. I felt that I had contributed some valuable work and learnt a lot on my internship. The work itself was very interesting and enjoyable and I was able to attend team meetings and learn more about the company as a whole.

I felt well valued by my colleagues. After I had learnt a suitable amount about how to use the programmes that I needed I felt that my colleagues appreciated the work that I did and listened to my opinions and thoughts on design problems. I was able to contribute a lot of work to a project and my colleagues valued the help.

I was given a lot of support and guidance and the environment made it very easy for me to ask questions when i wasn't 100% sure of what I was doing. I spent the first week working on a practice project to develop my skills with the programmes required before working on a local project.

Arup is a design consultancy which meant that the work that was available was dependent on how many projects they had as well as many other factors. I happened to be working at a time when they weren't particularly busy and so had a few times when there wasn't much to do until external approval on design requirements came through.

I was given a reasonable amount of responsibility during my internship. I was able to contribute to a local project and managed and maintained spreadsheets with calculations for the design requirements. I also did a fair amount of design work myself and felt my opinion and thoughts on how to solve problems was taken into account.

I developed many skills during the course of my internship and also learnt a lot of new skills. I learnt how to use three new programmes - Autodesk Revit, Navisworks and IES. I also improved my skills in Excel. I feel that these will all be useful in my studies and beyond and the work I was doing was in line with some topics I was studying in my degree.

It was a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere at work. Everyone seemed to get along and colleagues would stay after work on a Friday to go to the pub. It was very fun and nice to see that in an office environment people still have a lot of friendly and interesting conversations.

There was a practice project in place work me to develop my skills and I had someone teaching me all of the basics for the design work. I then went on to help with a local project and was given the opportunity to go on two site visits. All in all, well organised and enjoyable.

There were a lot of online training courses for me to complete and I learnt a lot about specific areas that helped me with the job. In some cases I was also given some graduate training material which allowed me to develop knowledge in certain areas such as cooling and the refrigeration cycle.

I think Arup is a great company and I especially support what they stand for as a company, especially in terms of the focus on sustainability. It was a very nice working environment and I had the opportunity to do a lot of interesting design work. I would definitely consider working for Arup in the future.

I was the only summer intern for a good deal of my time there so there was not a huge amount of opportunity for me to socialise. However, the other colleagues often would go to the pub together and I was more than welcome to join and socialise with them, which was nice.

I come from Nottingham so I lived with my parents which meant it didn't cost anything for me. I also think that socialising is very cheap here, especially compared to places in the south of England. Drinks and club entries are all quite cheap an you can find lots of places to socialise.

There are a lot of pubs and clubs in Nottingham which means the Nightlife is very good. There are lots of different places that you can go so there is something for everyone.

I'd say that there are plenty of thinks to do in Nottingham and lots of different social clubs that you can join. However, there weren't any out of work activities provided by the company for a Summer Intern - I think this might be different if I were fully employed.