Summer placement student Review

I received a good variety of work, although unfortunately it was mostly desk based research rather than practical as I had experienced on previous placements with the company.

I knew quite a few of my colleagues from placements with the company the previous summer and the year prior to that with some of them being particularly good friends outside work as well. Project managers seemed to appreciate me specifically finding them to ask for work when I had finished working on the previous project.

My team leader dealt with any HR issues I had or directed me to the correct place to sort it out myself, he was also very helpful in showing me where stuff had been moved to since I last worked there. He also offered to take a bit of time to help provide a solution to a problem I was having with a piece of work.

Usually you have a comfortable workload as a lot of work is self driven, however sometimes you will complete a project and it will be a couple of hours before you can get hold of some more work from another project manager as they may not be at their desk. Sometimes the workload does dramatically step up and you are required to work a bit later, perhaps an hour and a half, than normal for a couple of days, however you will be reimbursed for this in overtime payments or flexi-time.

Once you have been told what work needs to be done unless it needs more than one member of staff to complete it you are often left to complete the work on your own, if a problem emerges that you can not solve it is very rare that there will not be someone who can help you to solve it. The level of responsibility given will often depend what project you are working on and your technical expertise in the area.

My placements with DSTL have greatly helped my research skills, and have actually secured me a final year project in a field which I am interested in, they have also equipped me well for the project as I have completed quite similar work during my time at DSTL.

The atmosphere in the office was quite relaxed, with everyone getting on quite well and being able to crack jokes every now and then.

The placement was well organised with the exception of a couple of small IT issues both of which took roughly a week to get sorted, however I could work around both of them.

During my first placement the company invested quite extensively in me paying for me to attend a laser safety training course, a manual handling course and a presentation skills course and also paying me to spend the time getting up to speed reading up on areas which were new to me such as the correct writing of requirement documents.

I am planning on applying for a role within DSTL later this year, however I will likely move to a different department within the company to match specific interests which have developed over the course of studying my degree.

DSTL has a new starters scheme called STEPS which is organised and run by members of staff who have joined within the last 2 years, it allows you to meet colleagues from different departments or work areas, there is a pub quiz team made up of members who attend most weeks and they also did things at weekends.

Orpington is within the M25 so rent is not going to drop much below £350 a month, to do anything in the evening you need to go into London as Orpington is utterly devoid of anything to do.

Orpington has 3 pubs and they are all quite poor, however Bromley has plenty of good pubs, club wise you're probably best off heading for London and being robbed blind.

There are opportunities to get involved with activities through the CSSC with work, there are also all of the opportunities afforded to you by being a 20 minute train journey from the centre of London, however Orpington was very poor in this respect.