Undergraduate Placement Student Review

I thoroughly enjoyed working for Roke Manor Research Limited. The site was lovely and I was given a lot of creative control over exactly how I carried out my project. It was enjoyable, but challenging, work.

I felt very welcome at Roke. I was provided with a mentor in addition to my manager and my boss, and many of the graduates were very supportive whenever I had questions or just fancied a chat about things. There was also many other people that I came into contact with over the course of my internship who were very kind and never acted as though it was a problem to help or answer questions.

I was constantly in contact with my manager, and I had infrequent meetings with my boss - to his credit, this was due to the large number of changes that were happening at Roke at that stage which meant he could not meet with me as frequently as he would like. He was very apologetic about this fact and I had plenty of contact with my manager anyway who was always very supportive and had no issue with going over things with me repeatedly or even changing the project when we discovered that it was infeasible in its current state.

Most days were very busy - I would be in generally at 8:30 and work 7 and a half hour days with time for roughly half an hour for lunch. As I was the only one directly working on my project and my project was more proof-of-concept than anything, it was purely down to me to get everything done. In addition to my actual demonstrator, I was also writing documentation and exploring alternative ways to go about my project - this meant that I was very busy a lot of the time.

As mentioned previously - the project was proof-of-concept and therefore I was given full responsibility to create something that could be assessed by my supervisor and manager for potential use in company products. At multiple stages, we found that the initial specification for the work was not possible with the technology we were using and thus I was allowed to change the scenario we were addressing slightly to account for these changes.

Before start working at Roke Manor, I had very little experience in .NET languages and also working with Microsoft SQL Server. At the end of my 8 weeks there, I would say I am now fairly confident in both the .NET ecosystem and SQL Server. These are technologies which I'm sure will come up in both my degree and in the workplace so the internship was hugely beneficial in this respect. Also, I learnt the necessity of automation as my project involved multiple machines and towards the end, it became very tedious to update the machines with new versions of the prototype - in approaching a project like this again, I would definitely design it with automation in mind in future which would save time in the long term.

The atmosphere in the office was a little terse for the first few weeks - Roke had gone through a difficult period and staff morale wasn't superb. I definitely felt the atmosphere improve as the weeks went on and more people came back off summer holiday and such.

The internship was very well set up. On arriving on the first day, we were given training and did various administrative things and everything was very smooth. We were expected and there was no ambiguity in what were doing. I was given a desk with a computer and phone and everything was set up quite well. Equally, I knew who I was to contact if I had problems or if I needed support. I would therefore say it was very well organised.

I think the major investment that the company made in me was allowing me to work individually on a project with my supervisor and boss occasionally checking in on my progress. This gave me the confidence to work on something on my own but also to recognise when I would need assistance or clarification. It also gave me the confidence to get to a point in something and recognise that further time spent on it would not help matters - and thus to start again with a slightly revised goal.

I would love to work for Roke again over the summer. I would also strongly consider a job offer from them in the future.

I had lunch with my fellow placement students every day of work and we maintained contact over the internal company IM system.

I commuted into work so the cost of living was just the cost of staying at home plus a rail season ticket - Roke provided transport from the local rail station to their offices via a company minibus each day. This made it very cheap to work for Roke. There was not much socialising as myself and the other placement students did not live near Roke and thus I can't really comment on this.

Again, as with the previous question, I was commuting into work so I can't really speak for this point.

Roke had lots of internal little clubs and groups of people who shared interest. I recall there being mentioned of a variety of sport and martial art activities that generally ran during lunch times, as well as a Roke sailing group. There was a lot to get involved in.