Applications Engineer Review

NI a wonderful place to work (most of the time). The Applications Engineering department (where all the technical interns will be placed) has a really great atmosphere. There are times when there is a lot of work to do and it can sometimes get to much and seem unreasonable. However I can guarantee that by working at NI for a year if nothing else you will have a CV loading with enough experiences and training to arm you for any future graduate job interview.

Some times you can feel very unappreciated at NI. During the AE projects many of the teams do lots of out of work hours. We worked 12 hour days for a few weeks and even came in on a Saturday . The upside is that we finished with a fantastic project and once it was finished we got a lot of great feedback from the managers for what we had done. It would have been really nice though if the managers had given us a bit more encouragement during these projects and not just at the end. I feel we would have produced a better project and felt so much better about the whole process had that happened.

For the normal day to day job at NI the managers and supervisors could not be better. Any questions you have they're happy to help you out with. There is so much support from specialists and team leads for the really though issues that you will get. The way this is done at NI could not be better.

Work load at NI is very varied. The structure they have makes it so each person has around the same number of customers to deal with at one time. The problem with this is because of how varied the issues are you could have 10 service requests and have to little to do or have one extremely hard and important service request and not have enough time to do it. When dealing with the AE projects though there is not enough time to do these. It's almost an unwritten rule that you will have to work outside of work hours to get these projects done. they only last 3 months and for to first half of that time you will be planning and ordering hardware so it's only around 6 weeks where you are extremely busy. At the end you will be glad that you have the opportunity to do these projects but during them you won't feel that way.

Lots, NI has you directly contacting customers no matter how big they may be and this gives you lots of responsibility. You are in charge of managing your own work queue.

This is very hard to answer. At NI all of your technical skills will be related to NI hardware and software such as LabVIEW. Saying how this will help you in the future though is hard to say. If you plan on going back to NI or using LabVIEW the skills you gain are immense. If you don't plan on using LabVIEW once you graduate then the technical skills you gain aren't incredibly transferable. The once thing NI does give you no matter what you plan on doing in later life is an arsenal of soft skills. During my year there I will have taught and presented official training courses that last several days. You will also get to deliver hands on courses and marketing event. By speaking on the phone to customers day to day as well the soft skills you gain at NI are skills for life.

We had such fun in the office. From setting up scaletrix tracks and playing general jokes on each other it eas such a fun place to be.

You have 2 months of training before moving into the normal job. there are rotations into other departments you can go into such as Inside Sales or Technical Marketing. These tend to last around 3 months. The entire set up at NI is a tired and tested method and it couldn't be better.

The training you get at the start of your internship are industry standard courses. If you wanted to sit these courses and pay for them it would cost around £7000-£10,000. They are constantly asking what you want to learn about and what you want to do. You can then peruse these interests when you get a bit of work downtime and borrow and equipment you might need with no hassle at all.

Most people that work at NI stay there for a long time. Many people are there for 10 or 20 years. I would like to work at a few other places and see what working in another company might be like. As some of the technical skills at NI are limited I feel going back there and working there for even a couple of years would really limit your self as a LabVIEW or NI soft/hardware Engineer. I'd like to work for a company where I could gain a broad length of technical skills and work there for a couple of years as soon as I graduate. Due to this I doubt I'll be returning to NI. However I don't graduate till 2015 so I've no idea what I'll think then.

Everyone is fantastically nice and will go out all the time.

Newbury isn't student cheap but I don't think it's too bad. I lived in Reading and I'd say It's more expensive than living at Uni but cheaper than some places.

Reading has pretty decent Nightlife, Newbury not so much.

Everyone is always up for doing things but may live in Newbury so if you live in Reading or not closer it could be hard to find people to hang out with without going quite a way.