Instrument & Protective Systems Engineering Intern Review

I definitely enjoyed my internship. I was given opportunities to go out on site (refineries, tankers etc), as realising the scale of the things I was working on put the work into perspective. Everyone was very helpful from the beginning of the internship, and really welcoming. The office I worked in was relatively small, so getting to know a lot of people in the building and also being quite close with all the interns was good.

The work I was doing had genuine applications, and so needed to be done. It was good knowing that the work I was doing helped someone else. I did work for a few different sites, and so got to know and work alongside a number of different people. Knowing it made a difference to their day to day work gave me motivation to get the job done well.

Support was always there when I needed it. My manager was supportive, but didn't actually work in my exact discipline and was very busy, which meant that sometimes questions got redirected through a few different people before I got an answer. I had a graduate mentor who I worked with, who was very helpful and always had time to assist with any issues I had at work.

For the majority of my time, I was quite busy every day. I almost always had work to do, but was never put under any huge pressure either. If I had finished a piece of work, there was always something else I could start, or take a look at through my mentor. We also had a lot of training for the first month which kept us busy. I regularly got involved with meetings and had site visits also, so there was a really good balance between work being busy and not being overly stressful.

Most of the work I carried out will eventually be rolled out for use at the sites on a day to day basis. I was given responsibility to find out how to do some of the work myself, with guidance from others if it was needed. The amount of responsibility I had is definitely appropriate for the level of people doing the internship, as all work had to be reviewed by more senior engineers before it was put out for use.

Most of the training was quite useful, if a bit time consuming. A lot of the training was carried out online, and it's possible to choose e-learning modules that are specific to your discipline. I was also encouraged to undertake any other training I found interesting. The skills I developed are definitely valuable for both in and out of work. Working on such a range of different tasks and with so many different people was really interesting, and I feel it'll definitely be helpful moving forward.

The internship was set up quite well. There were set times for inductions, mid internship reviews and end of internship reviews. We had quite a lot of independence over when we carried out our work, and in what order. Having some structure was good but it was also good because we could vary the work we carried out day to day.

Employment prospects are currently quite good. As with all oil and gas companies, demand for staff can fluctuate quite a bit, but the impression we've been given is that the possibility of getting jobs at the end is quite high. We haven't been told specifically how many jobs are available at the end, but we find out whether we've been offered a job within 1-2 weeks of finishing.

The interns at work were fairly sociable, we organised to do things together quite often. As the offices were quite small, we seen each other a lot at work, and got to organise going for food or nights out a few times. Graduate employees also came along sometimes, but we didn't see as much of the older staff, as you'd expect.

Our office was near Grangemouth, so most interns lived in Glasgow. Compared to other quite large cities, the cost of living is very reasonable. Rent was definitely lower than the equivalent in my home town, as were nights out. We had to drive/get the train to work, but as we drove, the cost was split between us, making it very reasonable.