Internship Review

I have enjoyed my internship to a great extent. The working environment was friendly and the working hours are flexible. The projects designed for interns to complete are meaningful and the interns’ activity week was filled with interesting events such as hackathon, career fair and presentation feedback session. Almost every week there was a technical talk which the interns can attend and learn more about other areas in the company. It was a positive experience overall.

The project I was given is going to be very helpful to my team, according to what I’m told. But apart from this, my work is sort of detached from the rest of the team and interactions with colleagues were limited to my mentor and manager. So I’m not that sure about feeling valued.

I received great support and guidance from my mentor and manager. I sat next to my mentor and she was always helpful to answer any questions I may have. She and my manager also helped me in the design and implementation of my project, offering advice when I need to overcome technical difficulties, but still letting me have the responsibility for my own project.

There is good work-life balance here. We are expected to work 7.5 hours per day but the starting and ending time is flexible, meaning you can choose when to come in and leave, or how long do you want your lunch break to be. This flexibility makes you feel less stressed. There’s only one project I need to do for this internship so the workload is reasonable. There are also many sports/games activities which we can join at lunchtime.

I was given a project and have responsibility for it. My mentor and manager were there to give general guidance but I’m still responsible for its design and implementation. I wasn’t given any other responsibilities other than this project, which I found reasonable given the duration of the internship and the workload of my own project.

The skills I’ve learned are important complements to what I’ve studied in my degrees. The computer science courses in my university are very theoretical and lack emphasis on practicalities. In this internship, however, I’ve picked up practical skills in web development, both backend and frontend, which I believe will be useful in my careers.

Overall the internship was set up very well. There were plenty of enriching activities in the intern’s activity week so you get to step back from your daily work for a week (and still get paid). For the project planned for me was designed so that it can be developed in an Agile fashion, where I could learn new stuff and apply them in my project and add new features in a very fast-paced cycle. So I’m happy about how the internship was set up.

I feel that the company has a good emphasis on training and development in its employees. At the start of the internship I was given a series of online training resources to complete and I had about a week or so to complete them (and still get paid for this).

I feel that there was good social scene in general (although I didn’t participate in many). There were welcome drinks on Mondays when there were new interns joining, as well as leaving drinks when someone finished his internship. The interns also had pub lunches on Fridays and occasionally go to bars on weekends.

The office I worked in is in Enfield, London. The cost of living is generally not very high as the company offers company house to its interns at an affordable price. However it is a bit inconvenience to go to central London (to meet friends, for example), and the transportation costs a bit more.

Not sure about nightlife as I prefer to stay home.