Student Intern Review

I really enjoyed 'working' during my internship... so much so that it didn't feel like work at all because the project I was working on was so fun, interesting and challenging, There are a lot of activities organised by the company - for instance Intern Day and an internal hackathon. There were also a lot of other activities to take part in inside the building - table tennis, video games, football table etc. and outdoors too - going pub, sports at lunch time.

I felt my work was valued, otherwise it wouldn't be part of the main codebase. I also had control over the direction my project was headed - being able to voice my ideas during daily stand ups or regular meetings. My team would also organise pub sessions when I reached any significant milestone - getting my first production based pull request approved.

I was given a lot of support from my mentors and manager. I regularly pair programmed with my mentors ranging from anything between 5 minutes up to a whole day! During code reviews, it was also very valuable to get opinions from everyone in my time. I believe this as well as pair programming has been few of the most important reasons for improvement in my coding skill. When I came in initially, I hadn't used most of the technologies before. It was astonishing to see how much I had improved over the period of 3 months. This internship has really given me the momentum to go on and learn other things in my own time, whilst I am at university.

I always had work to do during the entire internship, particularly because the project I worked one was in its very early stages. Hence a lot of thought was put into designing, developing and testing the system. However what I really liked was that there was not a lot of pressure put on me to have a certain amount of work done by certain period of time... I could spend time learning and implementing what I learnt without cutting any corners.

I had quite a huge responsibility - to create an entire service, although it wasn't time critical. I also worked on a project with slightly less domain knowledge required to learn so it actually made getting the project up and running a lot smoother, because I could gradually learn software engineering principles and then learn other oil specific knowledge in more detail.

What I have learnt over the 3 months have been hugely beneficial for me both in terms of developing my skill as a software engineer and my Computer Science course at university. For university specifically, I had the opportunity to learn software engineering principles and implement them before my university taught the principles. This internship has also given me a lot more confidence because I have industrial experience working with latest technology, and now I am able to carry on the momentum, which I wouldn't have had, if I didn't do this internship...

The atmosphere was very lively in my department. I also really liked that there was so many different rooms - study rooms, meeting rooms etc. Additionally, As mentioned in my first question, there's plenty of opportunity to enjoy both work and non-work related - table tennis etc.

Overall it was very well organised, although the nature of agile software development is that things can change very quickly. All events were also very well organised.

I pair programmed quite often and being able to also have other people's time during code reviews was also very helpful. I also had meetings with my manager and colleagues to be brought up to speed with the project. I was also able to work independently a lot of the time so it was a perfect combination for me.

The company is pushing for cloud based projects, which is one of the latest trends, so it is very appealing.

The other interns and I regularly played table tennis etc. during lunch times. We also organised dinner, go karting events outside of work, which was a lot of fun. We also plan on forming a team together for London hackathons.

It's all relative but it is definitely a lot cheaper than living in London.

Only downside is that Abingdon is a very industrial area, so for socialising, Oxford is a lot better. Nightlife is in your control. I personally enjoyed going out towards Oxford during the weekends or cycling in my area.

Too many, as mentioned earlier - outdoor sports, table tennis, intern organised events etc.