Wireless Software Engineer Review

I really enjoyed my placement. Aside from the content of the work itself, which was a nice mix of challenging and interesting, the workplace environment was fun and supportive. There were regular team-building events, which made me feel included from the start, and a lot of effort was made to ensure I felt included in office goings-on.

Even though, due to the nature of my work, I only interacted or was directly involved with a small number of people, Despite this, I definitely felt valued by everyone in the office - on numerous occasions, people went out of their way to help me with something, or just teach me about an area of their work which interested me.

I think I was given a good amount of support throughout my placement. Personally, I prefer to work independently, which was something my supervisor allowed me to do, trusting me to set my own deadlines and complete the work at an appropriate pace. When I did need help, he was always more than happy to talk me through areas I found particularly challenging, or give me a structured set of goals for which to aim.

For most of my placement I had a good amount of work to do. Every project I worked on was fairly open-ended, which meant I had a nice amount of freedom, thereby meaning there was always something I could find to work on. The only times where I didn't have a huge number of options for things to work on were when I was stuck on a particular problem.

I was not given a huge amount of responsibility on my placement. I worked mostly independently, which meant that the only things I was responsible for were the projects on which I worked. While I did have to design the structures for these, they formed part of a larger project, and I did not have to maintain any larger projects or machines.

I think the skills I learned will be extremely valuable for the rest of my degree and in my future career. Through programming for hours every day, I believe I am significantly stronger at writing and understanding code. I had not used C++ before starting my placement, and I know that the months I have spent learning about it and developing with C++ will help me in my final year at university, where I will be using C as part of my year-long dissertation project.

There were a good number of training exercises and resources from the beginning of my placement. In the first couple of weeks I completed a number of training modules and was quickly brought 'up to speed' with industry-specific tools and general knowledge. I was allowed and encouraged to spend time learning about programming languages and tools before working with them, which allowed me to get a well-rounded knowledge of the tools I would be using, which I can take with me after my placement's conclusion.

There was only one other placement student with me, so opportunities for social activity with colleagues were somewhat limited. That being said, there were numerous lunch time events and a couple of social gatherings after work which I enjoyed. There was a budget set aside each month to fund these sorts of events, which meant one or two times a month there was something fun going on, even if just in the office.

Bath is a fairly expensive city to live in, but due to its size and my house's location relative to the office, I was able to walk to and from work each day. This meant that I had no travel costs because of work. I lived in a student house, which was not too expensive, and very much affordable on my salary. Socialising was similar, slightly more expensive than I would like, but definitely affordable.

Bath, as a student city, has a fair amount going on at night. There are a good selection of bars and pubs in the city, which are normally very busy during term time. As I am a student at the University of Bath, there were also a number of on-campus events I was able to get involved with. Bath also has easy travel by train or bus to Bristol, which has a huge amount going on.

There weren't too many work-related activities I could be involved with outside of work. There was a visit to the placements fair at the University of Bath, where people talked about the placement to prospective interns, but I was not able to attend. Due to the nature of my work, I was not very involved with anyone outside of the office, so there was no real need for me to engage in activities outside of the main office.