Software Engineering Internship Review

I really enjoyed it, we were given a lot of training opportunities and the work I was doing was very interesting. Despite having to do the internship virtually (due to the coronovirus restrictions) BP made a lot of effort to allow us to have an equally good experience online. We were all given a graduate ‘buddy’ which was great as it gave us someone who could answer questions completely honestly and they gave a fair insight into work at the company as well as giving great advice.

I spent most of the internship working with other interns as I was in a group of interns (which is more unusual for bp internships). We were definitely valued by most of the people in the company we got in contact with and by our manager. There were some difficult people we encountered who I can’t exactly say valued us but I guess it was useful experience in dealing with difficult situations. Our project was definitely valued by the company as the work interns and grads do is definitely valued strongly by the company.

Our manager gave us some direction with our project but left mostly up to ourselves to decide what project to do and made us find our own contacts within the company. However this was mostly beneficial as we had a lot of scope to choose a project that we wanted to do. Also, a lot of training and contacts to technical people was provided so we had a lot of support. As I worked in a group with other interns the project was left more open ended, however normally most interns are placed within an existing team in the company and are given a project so have less scope for choice.

Some days we were very busy, I think this was made worse by the virtual environment as in the office people would leave at 5pm but as we were at home people would work later than that so we definitely worked longer hours than advertised, however it was mainly left up to us how long to work. I think also if the internship hadn’t been shortened from 11 to 6 weeks we wouldn’t have had to work as much overtime. But the project was fun so often I didn’t mind working longer hours.

The projects interns are given here normally contribute directly to the company and usually we were treated like any other bp employee when trying to complete our project. So we were given a lot of responsibility and all the required resources and data to carry out our projects. So long as we could make a strong argument for any data/resources we needed then we were able to get them. It did often require jumping through a lot of hoops but this appeared to be normal whether we were interns or had been at the company for years.

We were given a lot of training. As a software engineering intern it was great to get a lot of training in the AWS cloud computing platform and they even paid for us to complete as external qualification in it after the internship ended. Bp are very willing to help employees further their technical skills so there was lots of access to training courses liked LinkedIn learning. The programming experienced I received was particularly helpful to my degree and will definitely be useful training for my career.

I completed the internship virtually so I never actually visited the office so can’t comment on the exact atmosphere. The atmosphere I got virtually was that the majority of people were always willing to help out colleagues. It wasn’t very pressuring and there wasn’t much pressure to work overtime (though we had to anyway to meet deadlines). People were mostly friendly and interested to learn about our work. But it was hard to judge the social side of things with the internship being virtual.

Considering how difficult the situation companies had to deal with in 2020 they did a great job at organising the internship. The HR department and the I&E department did a great job at organising a schedule of online training. They also organised a lot of opportunities for us to network with people. I also had lots of talks by people working in different jobs within the company to get an insight into the opportunities within the company.

We had lots of training, not all of it was useful we wasted about 4h learning about how to give PowerPoint presentations which was useless. The yeh interns also got external training from Amazon on their customer focus approach and how to use the AWS platform. BP also pay for LinkedIn learning and other training courses for all employees so there are lots of training courses you can take in your spare time if you want in addition to the ones that are part of the internship.

I think most people are given a job within them at the end, though it does depend which department your internship lies within. We were assessed throughout the internship had a final assessment at the end of the internship to determine whether we would get a job. I think so long as you do a good job and show all the bp ‘valued and behaviours’ within your internship you will likely be given a graduate contract to start the next September. It is difficult though if you want to defer this a year or if you decide you want a different job to the one your internship was in.

This is hard to judge as the whole internship is online so there wasn’t exactly an easy way to have a social life when people are not even doing the internship from the same country. Luckily I had a lot of contact with interns as i worked in a team of interns but most of the interns who weren’t in technology worked in established teams with people who had been at the company for 5-30 years so didn’t get that many chances to socialise. There were some social video calls organised after working hours though.

We worked from home so I didn’t have to spend any money in rent or transport. Had I been placed in an office I would’ve been in Sunbury which is London so isn’t cheap to live but it’s a bit outside of London (near Heathrow) so it’s cheaper than central London. The downside is Sunbury isn’t great for socialising as there’s not much there other than the bp offices but it’s easy to get the train into London.

The internship was virtual and due to coronovirus there wasn’t exactly much of a nightlife scene going on anywhere in the UK so it’s hard to answer this question. Most of the bp interns are stationed at Sunbury but some engineering and geophysicists are placed in Aberdeen which doesn’t have a great nightlife from what I have heard. Sunbury also doesn’t have a great nightlife as it’s outside London and there’s not that much there but it’s easy to get the train to London.

The internship was virtual so the only opportunities we had were virtual intern ‘families’ run by a couple of grads at bp after work with about 6 interns but often not everyone turned up as they were organised outside of working hours and also they were somewhat awkward being that we only met over video call. However, at least HR tried to organise some social activities which was very difficult given the global pandemic situation.