Summer Internship Review

I thoroughly enjoyed working for Arup as my first industrial placement, and I wish that I could have stayed for longer, since I realised that six week was enough to give me an insight into the scope of projects that the company does and how it feels to work at their office. There was a very good atmosphere and a good balance between graduates and senior engineers.

We maintained a good professional relationship and I was treated like one of them. Though your responsibilities are of less importance than theirs.

My main source of support was my mentor, who was a graduate engineer, occasionally I was helped or given tasks by my line manager. Otherwise, any technical help needed was provided by the technicians.

I would say there were a couple of days when I was very busy due to deadlines or being given several tasks at a time. Most of the time it was a fair amount of work to keep me going throughout the day.

I was given small tasks in big scale currently running projects, which though it may not seem like much, you feel accomplished for having taken part in a real engineering project, together with all the workers in the office, or even spread across several offices around the world.

I developed basic essential skills such as efficient time management, working in a professional environment, team work as well as working on a variety of multidisciplinary projects and getting an insight into the structure and management of real scale engineering projects. Together with this I learnt to use a different version of CAD used in the office called Microstation, which further helped develop my technical skills gained in first year. I also wrote technical reports, supervised by a mentor, through which I learnt the correct technical paraphrasing and terms to include. As one of my smaller tasks I got the opportunity to collaborate into editing the final touches of a bidding project, which is an area that I found to be incredibly useful, especially for later years, when I would like to work on the management aspects of engineering.

The general atmosphere in the office was very friendly and informal, within limits.

It wasn't organised previous to my arrival and the first day was a bit of waiting around since the correct programme hadn't been installed on my pic but after that, I mainly worked in collaboration with my mentor, who gave me tasks throughout the placement

In terms of personal training and development, and moulding the placement to your needs, I feel like the placement wasn't very oriented towards that but I certainly developed skills I wouldn't have gained in uni.

The future employment prospects within the organisation seem very appealing since all graduate engineers working at the company seemed thoroughly sure that they were in the right place. From the moment you start working at the office, you work towards charter ship and everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs.

I was working with students from my same course, and even between the other fellow placement students, their was a good social relationship.

On average, the costs were the same as during university, since I was working in the same city.

Nightlife was the same as it was in uni, maybe less students going out since it was during the summer and everyone went home

There was a Team Building weekend organised by the section of the office that I was working in and that was a lot of fun, aside from that you could join sports clubs and societies in the company.