Engineering Intern Review

I had a good year at Flowmaster. The work I was given was interesting and meaningful and care was taken to ensure I always had enough work to do. I was one of 4 interns and I was able to have some input into the work I wanted to do as the placement progressed. The hours were very much 9-5 and I felt respected as an intern. There was a reasonable amount of camaraderie between interns and some of the younger full-time staff.

There was some variance here. As an intern you are often exposed to many different projects, which gives a good opportunity to learn a lot. However because of this you aren't really part of a team, so it can be difficult to integrate with everybody. Also because interns often get quite different projects to the software devs and testers working in teams, a lot of the time said teams won't know quite what it is you're working on, hence you can sometimes feel like "an intern" as opposed to an "actual" full-time employee. However that isn't to say however that you're isolated - I was very well respected and valued by the people I worked with more often and I had great relationships with a lot of the full-time staff and managers, inside and outside of the ones I worked more closely with.

Support and guidance was fantastic. My line manager was careful to ensure I had the right amount of work at any time, keeping me busy but giving me the opportunity to share some of my work with other people if I was too overloaded. I had input on this however - even if I had a lot on my plate, I could choose to keep hold of it all as long as I could deal with it. Outside of my line manager, I generally completed work for different managers. They were always available to ask questions and walk me through anything I hadn't done before. Equally they respected my output and I had some great collaborative relationships with them - if I thought there was a better way of doing something, they would be open to hearing about it. I would highly recommend the placement from this perspective.

It varied at the beginning as I "learnt the ropes", however as the placement progressed I was generally a nice level of busy. I had more than enough work to keep me busy but rarely had to stay past 5. I also generally had more than one thing to work on at a time, meaning I wasn't stuck grinding away at one thing for weeks at a time. Interns were given a good amount of responsibility in managing their time and workloads and were trusted to deliver. There were a couple of periods where I was working to a set deadline (along with the other interns) and we had to work rapidly under pressure but I see this as a constructive experience. Towards the end I was working on a self-initiated project as well as my regular work and got very busy, however this was entirely my own doing - you can make yourself as busy as you want to be I think is the key thing here.

I was given a good amount of responsibility. Interns are generally trusted to get things done once you get into the swing of things. There was a great culture of sticking to a reasonably "flat" hierarchy, which meant my views were as well respected as senior management's in meetings (as long as you know what you're talking about of course!). I was also given ownership of two tools I worked on, which meant I was responsible for their running, maintenance and reporting. Towards the end I also developed a new tool alongside another intern, which I took ownership of and passed onto the new interns.

The atmosphere was friendly, being a small office you knew everyone. There were several times when pizza was ordered for the office to celebrate a particular achievement or milestone, and following a major software release there was an office excursion to celebrate. There was a small kitchenette with a coffee machine and fruit on each floor, which were good places to take a quick break and chat with whoever was in there, offering a good opportunity to get to know people. There was however a bit of an art to judging how busy somebody was, as disturbing a person or a team with a deadline to meet (even if you had an urgent issue only they could deal with) could be met with resistance. This isn't unique to Flowmaster though of course. Also interns tended to eat together and it took a while to integrate enough to, for example, eat with other staff at lunch - however after a while I was being invited to dinners outside of work with some groups of staff, it just took a while to get to that point!

I gained a huge amount of knowledge in Excel, VBA, scripting and also general software testing and debugging. Excel and VBA are invaluable skills in the majority of roles engineers go into after graduating. I was given the opportunity to learn how to automate software tests using C#. Each intern is given a developers license for MS Visual Studio so you have all the tools at your disposal to do your job and beyond. I also got to use FloEFD, a 3D CFD program. And of course I ended up well on my way to being an expert in Flowmaster. To summarise, I learnt a huge amount thanks to my work and was given a lot of support at first, so most of the training and development was on the job rather than on training days etc.. There was also an emphasis on learning in your work - so if you had a task to complete, and there was a way of doing it which would contribute more to your development but take longer, then managers would encourage you to take that option. There were also two personal development and time management training sessions which were open to the entire office and were interesting and useful.

Being a small company there is no guarantee of a job with them after graduating regardless of how well the placement went, as they do not know whether they will be hiring a year down the line. However we were advised to get in touch when looking for grad jobs and if there was a role open we would be strongly considered. I was also advised that we would be in a strong position should we be interested in any other roles the parent company, Mentor Graphics Inc, had open.

I spent a fair bit of time with other engineering interns in work and got along well with them. Outside of work we rarely spent time together. However there was a reasonably social scene with the other non-engineering interns and a recent graduate working there. Because the office was located out in the countryside we all lived reasonably far apart so that made it more difficult to get together regularly. Pretty much it depends on the other interns!

I lived in Northampton in a house share with non-work people. The nightlife in Northampton was reasonable, similar to other similar sized places and I went out with my house-mates a bit. There was also a good live music scene. Some of the other interns lived in Milton Keynes which I suspect also has a reasonable nightlife, plus in MK you're not too far from London if you have friends living there.