Assembly Intern Review

I really enjoyed my work placement at BMW Group in Plant Oxford. I learned a lot of relevant skills to my engineering degree while on the job, along with other general office skills which will benefit me in my future career. Overall it has been a very good first experience of working full time.

I felt very valued by my colleagues. Anytime I needed help with anything I was given all the support necessary immediately. After a few months of learning and settling in I was an integrated part of the team, and all the work I completed was appreciated by my colleagues and superiors.

Any time I needed support or guidance I did not feel like I could not approach my managers or supervisors for help. They were always very supporting. With this placement, I learnt a lot during the month handover at the start of the placement with the intern I was replacing, this helped me a lot with my placement.

This depended on how many projects were ongoing. I had some busy weeks followed by weeks of not a lot of work today, sometimes nothing at all for a day. This would get a bit frustrating sometimes as I wanted to do work while at work but was not able to.

I was given full responsibilty over my work during my placement. This allowed me to independantly complete all the tasks I was given, and made me feel like I was trusted. This meant the quality of my work was always quite high as I could complete it to a high standard at my own pace.

I think a lot of the work I did was very relevant to a future career in engineering. I used CAD softwares to complete projects, and also recieved an extremely in depth view of the inner workings of a manufacturing facility. However, there was no opportunity to really use any of my technical engineering knowledge, but that was purely because of the position I was in.

The atmosphere in my office space was extremely friendly, I made many friendships with the other interns I worked with and was allowed to socialise with them during breaktimes. I also was able to have chats with non-interns, and got to learn more about the business through them. I always looked forward to coming into work and meeting my colleagues.

There was a lot of confusion when before I started my placement, as there was little to no communication and whatever communication we had often had conflicting pieces of information. Once arriving, it took a while to set up my computer account and my access to different relevant materials that i needed to work.

My manager regularly recognised that I was there for my personal training and development as well, and allowed me to work with other departments which I found interesting, meaning I could personally train in many different areas and diversify my knowledge base. BMW also provided many corporate training programs for free.

Unfortunately, BMW does not offer graduate positions for interns, and I will have to compete with everyone else when applying for future employment prospects. There are over 50 interns at Plant Oxford every year but only around 5 graduates are taken on every year, which shows how much harder it is to gain future employment.

There was a very good social scene with the interns here, which is a big positive compared to other internships. There was an intern circle which organised weekly pub socials which were very fun and allowed me to get to know my intern friends a lot better, making work more fun too.

Oxford is one of the most expensive cities to live in the UK, and this was reflected in the cost of living and socialising. Rent was quite high, and going out to the pub or to eat was not cheap. However, we were paid a decent wage which could allow me to live very comfortably.

As oxford is a student town, the nightlife is decent, but definitely not the best and not very varied at all. On top of that, as previously mentioned, the cost of going out and buying drinks is extremely high here, meaning that a night out was often very expensive and not worth the price.

BMW did not really offer any opporttunities outside of work to get involved with. The intern socials were organised by interns. There was also weekly intern football, but again this was organised independantly by interns rather than by BMW. It would also have been nice if BMW had offered us the opportunity to learn german through work but this was not offered.