Technology Developer Review

The virtual experience, once the technology was all set up, was very enjoyable. It did however take a very long time to get the technology set up to the extent where I could start working. Once I started working, the project given was very engaging and fun to work on. Further, the training and mandatory sessions were good. The scheduling of the days was very flexible and my team and I were given the freedom to plan how to complete the project in the way that we thought would be best, with guidance from full-time employees.

Even though the project was not a very large and important project, it was a proper project which will be used by employees when completed. This made the work I was doing feel important and valuable to the company. Further, when meeting with full-time employees they valued my opinions. The freedom that we were given made me feel more valued as they trusted me to do my work without holding my hand throughout the entire process. Overall I felt decently valued.

There was a very short project brief at the start of the internship which left a lot to be desired and meant that we had to set up meetings with many different people just to try to get a grasp of what we were supposed to do. When there was an issue, I was always to get guidance on how to proceed with not too much delay. This was very good however the lack of guidance from the start was a bit frustrating.

Even though the software I was working on is not relative to any of the modules in my degree, the skills from working with other people, problem solving, communication, coding quality, documentation and the process working on the project are skills that I developed a lot during this internship and should help me in university and especially after my degree. The information I received through talking to employees of the company, training sessions and speaker sessions is vast and will be very useful for after the end of my degree.

The internship was in general decently well structured. One major criticism is that a few of the training/speaker sessions were announced with not to long a notice. This became an issue for when I had already scheduled a meeting for the time and had to rearrange it. However, this only happened a couple of times, apart from that the sessions were relatively spread out and only a couple times took up my lunch break. Some times there was a few too many sessions on a day meaning less work could be done.

The atmosphere once work started was very positive, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was some pressure to ensure that the work was complete to the best extent but this did not remove from the experience. Communication was a bit of a struggle at some points but I became used to this pretty quickly and then it kind of became apart of the atmosphere. For the most part there weren't many gaps between fun activities.

There was access to many resources. These were well advertising and there were sessions on how to use these properly. There was no mandatory training which would have been nice to give guidance on which would be best. There were also some training sessions that were organised by the company which were alright, but didn't weren't too interesting to follow. The online resources were much better and allowed you to learn many new skills and languages.

I don't think it helped a lot to understand what a full time role would be like. My team were separate and didnt really get a chance to work alongside full-time employees and did meetings/... in the way that we thought were best but not necessarily as a full-time employee would do. Further, the virtual nature of the internship and the large technical difficulties left little time to actually do work and experience what the job would be like. However, we did get the chance to take part in department meetings.

Company culture was a vital part of the initial training and how we were evaluated at the end of the internship. The company values were emphasized heavily and we were strongly encouraged to actively follow these and learn more about this. Some of the other company cultures were harder to experience without being their in person. However, in many aspects I was still able to learn through the meetings, emails and general communication with full-time employees.

I think the content of the internship was very helpful in this aspect. I have seen many different parts of the company in terms of what they do, the kind of projects that developers work on and how the employees fit into the company. It showed me how it was like to work in a bank and also a very big company with offices spread across the world. It was very good to get a feel of what working for the company would be like.

Paid for the original length of the internship even though it was eventually shortened.

There were a few networking events with different parts of the company.

The virtual nature of these events made it impossible to talk to someone in the way I would have wanted to. Everything was just a panel of people whilst interns one at a time ask questions. All networking/social events where there was a personal element to it had to be organised separately and even those were tricky as everything is just a call. There was incentive to meet with people more senior in the company which was good.

A couple.

I think that overall the internship was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot from it. There were elements that could have been better but it teaches important skills in how to work in a company, and also gives a good taste of what the industry is like without having to commit too much time. There was a lot of independent which work which was not what I expected but it was a very worth while experience