Intern Review

I mostly helped out on various project working on HVAC designs of large infrastructures, working on schematics and models to make sure they were representative of the work from the graduates. Overall, I had to finalise the details for early stage designs rather than design solutions myself.

I learnt mostly about the softwares used in the industry. Rhino, Bluebeam, IESve and Revit were all new to me, so even by doing relatively simple tasks, I was put in quite a challenging position as teh exercise were quite unique. The other specifics that I learnt were all revolving about the components used in the specific designs, as the graduates explained to me why certain design choices had been made.

The amount of responsability varied extremely depending on my supervisor. I changed three spervisors over the internship, switching project. Each had their own type of idea of task that I was supposed to do, making the internship more or less intense depending on the project. On the most part, however, I would say only partly, as I was usually tasked with tedious tasks that graduates would not have time to complete.

There was no formal training as part of the internship, which, if I am being completely honest, I was hoping there would be. Nevertheless the other people in the team were always extremely available to explain what I was supposed to do, providing detailed background explanations for every task. Furthermore, I always felt safe in going to them when asking for help, which they always gave whenever I was stuck on a job.

Generally, I can only say I wish I had more time to spend in the compnay to get to know more people. Everyone is always extremely kind and approachable, as well as clever. In this scenario I spent most of my time with the graduates, who are also the Social Secretaries for the events that were organised. The group was united and lively, and often offered to do activities together after work, which I appreciated.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the internship under many aspects: surely I can say I learned a lot from a technical point of view and understood to a deeper level the type of work that a mechanical engineer in building services has to deal with every day. All in all, I appreciated having moments to learn and going into detail with very ambitious projects, so I am happy to have done so. I believe it would have been beneficial to increase its duration though.

Yes

Make sure of knowing exactly what you are applying to - often you don't get the best idea from positions ads. Having said this, I was happy to see that what I applied to was similar to what I was expecting, although the details you can only learn them on the job.