Wireless Systems Engineer Review

The work I was involved with was varied and interesting. My placement allowed me to be involved in two different areas of path-finding research, so I got to see a wide range of job roles. Both roles where in the same team, so i got to experience how the roles worked together to achieve the teams goals.

My placement team was small, so I had a lot of contact with all the members of the team. I got to work with all of them over the course of my placement and developed good working relations with them. I felt that my colleagues appreciated the work I did and that they supported my ideas/contributions.

I was fully supported while on placement. My placement overlaps with the previous placement student, I found this helpful to learn from someone who was in a similar position as me. During my placement, my supervisor was very supportive and was helpful with any questions or problems I was having with the work, while also encouraging my to find my own solutions.

Work load was fairly consistent throughout the placement. Usually I would be given a number of tasks to do that I could progress in any order. There was always more work to do if I ran out of tasks, and I never felt over worked with the tasks set for me.

Once I was give a task the responsibility to complete that task was completely mine. If a number of tasks where set I was free to complete them in any order, and managing my time on each was up to me. I was always able to seek help and guidance if I was stuck/lost.

I've learnt a lot of skills that I will take back with me to my studies and further jobs. General skills such as using software tools, processes, and time management are universally useful regardless of job role. While gaining insight into research areas will help prepare me for my studies.

I had a small team, so when people work from home it left the office quite empty, but it wasn't a problem for me personally. The office is laid-out so that it's easy to go over to talk to any one in the team, there's also nice areas for meetings and planning.

Overall the placement was well organised. My team has had a lot of experience with interns and placement students and so were familiar with how to run things. Having a month with the previous placement student also helped to get things set up quickly. The "on-boarding" process from HR was also helpful to get all the work place admin done smoothly.

There wasn't much "official" training by my business unit, however, my team did provide a lot of training. I (as well as the rest of my team) had tutorials to improve our work, develop techniques and use new software tools. we also had write ups on the other research that was being done so that we could keep up to date with what our team members were doing.

it's a small team that is unlikely to be hiring anytime soon. That, and the fact that many of the other engineering teams I would want to work in have moved out of the country. Maybe in the future it'll move back, or the team will expand, but right know it's unlikely.

There is over 50 other placement students at this site. There is a mix of placement types, finance, marketing, software. There are organised events and activities that we do as part of the company. We also organised our own stuff to do outside of work. The is also team building events throughout the year.

Costs are average for the area.

There's lots of restaurants around, quite a few pubs, and a couple of nightclubs. The restaurants I've been too where nice. I don't know much about the clubs, other people I know who have been say they're good.

There's quite a few things to do near by, but more if you're willing to travel to the larger nearby cities. Bath and Bristol are very close, and London isn't that far away. So if you can travel there's lots to do. In town there's movies, mini-golf, various sports and shopping centers.