Power Academy Intern Review

It was quite enjoyable. At times I felt unchallenged and bored though. There was a feeling that the work we were doing was unimportant and would be ignored once we left.

The other placement students/power academy students are like a family. We lived, socialised and worked together, it was great. Same with the graduates. The actual engineers in my team were also mostly welcoming but with the age gap sometimes harder to relate to. In terms of feeling valued, we did feel at times that our work was unimportant and we were fairly unchallenged by the tasks given to us. We didn't need any of our degree knowledge.

We were given excellent support. We had the technical support of technical experts in our team as well as the guidance of our line manager who was always happy to help us and show us what to do. We also had a helpful buddy who gave us a lot of useful information.

We had to spend a lot of time waiting for people to get back to us before we could do the work we needed to do. Our project didn't give us something to be working hard on all the time.

While our project was interesting for National Grid and a good solution would have been helpful, the critical parts had been completed already by senior engineers and failure to complete our project would have essentially had no consequences for the company.

Skills in business writing, report writing, dealing with people, working in a big company, delivering presentations, dealing with HR, dealing with senior engineers, dealing with people in different departments etc. hasve been invaluable.

There was a friendly atmosphere, particularly between placement students. People were of course busy and doing their jobs though so there wasn't a lot of time to chat!

The placements have been significantly improved this year with much better IT facilities and provision and a clear project was established right from day 1. We had regular meetings with our manager to make sure that we were on track to complete our project. Everything was well organised for we delivered final presentations for HR which ran very smoothly.

The company has invested a lot over the last few years in terms of power academy sponsorship. All of our development though has been through placements with no additional training offered. I believe the focus of training with National Grid is for the graduate scheme.

National Grid looks like a great company to work for, particularly on the graduate scheme. It is unclear how many jobs are available but it we have all been invited to an assessment centre and it has been made clear that they would like to give us jobs as long as we perform well.

Yes it was excellent. We socialised every weekend and during the week regularly. There was a large community of graduates and power academy students.

We were lucky with our landlord and had very very cheap rent. I believe in general the area is a bit more expensive than that. As our landlord has 12 bedrooms though this shouldn't be an issue for most placement students. Socialising was reasonably priced. Drinks are more expensive than they are in Scotland but cheaper than they are in London, of course. Fairly average, I think?

It was quite good. Lots of bars and a couple clubs in the area. Birmingham is possible for a night out but it's really too far away to come back again that night.

I didn't really look. I'm sure there would have been. I socialised only with people from work as there were so many of us.