Software Engineering Intern Review

Overall, I did enjoy my time with Tesco. While there were certainly difficulties, the main factor that made it enjoyable was the people here. It really is a chill and inclusive environment. Everyone is still very hard-working and gets their tasks done, but it is not nearly as intense as somewhere like a consultancy or a bank. While my project was not the most interesting and definitely came with its challenges, my team made up for that as we were often laughing together and having fun.

Obviously this differed for me based on how much I worked with certain colleagues. The ones that I worked with the most in my team were amazing and I absolutely loved them and they made me feel so welcome. Everyone else were extremely friendly whenever I came to them with a question or issue. The people here truly are amazing. You will probably hear this a lot from anyone who has worked here and it's because it's true; my colleagues were the best part about my internship.

My line manager, who I worked next to everyday and spent the most time with was incredibly supportive. If I ever needed help, no matter how occupied she was, she would help me with whatever I needed. However, the managers above her played quite a distanced role and were not too involved in the tasks I was doing. I think this made my project much more difficult, especially when these managers had different ideas of the tasks I should do to approach my project.

This changed for me dependent on how my project was progressing. At the beginning, I was learning to use SQL and familiarizing myself with everything and talking to different people about my project so I was not too busy at all. However, when my project began to pick up pace, I found myself being quite busy. Especially for the last few weeks I was very busy.

I was definitely given a lot of responsibility on my project. While this sounds ideal and something that I thought was great at the start, I think my project was so challenging that I needed a lot of help to approach it. This being said, I think if I had gotten a little luckier with my assigned project, the amount of responsibility I was given was great and very empowering.

It has been an extremely useful process and has made me change what modules I want to do in the future as I have found a new passion for data science work that I had never experienced before. I was able to discover a whole range of different tools and learning how to use them has been very useful. Even learning about the different processes within the business has been valuable.

It was a very balanced office where the working hours were not too long and there wasn't a sense of people working very late. Although a little bit out of London, it had its benefits and the weekly team lunch was very enjoyable. There was less of a sense of going for drinks after work which I preferred. The office itself was quite spacious and it felt very open.

It was very well organised as there was both a central team organising it as well as the role specific team who were organising our placement within the exact teams. The only problems were with organising trips etc. were they would often change the date/time on a regular basis which was frustrating. However, working within my team itself was quite well set up. Though added communication could have improved things.

There was a good sense of training with a lot of opportunities throughout the placement. There were sessions that helped overall skills such as networking, Excel etc. and more specific training through an online site. I completed training on one particular tool which was very useful. Overall, there was a lot of opportunity if you wanted to develop yourself or simply learn from those around.

The future prospects were well set out for us and we were able to see the ladder that we could climb depending on which part of the business we wanted to look in. There was development on a technical side as well as managerial. There are also good graduate programs and future placements. Although the pay isn't the best for the technical sector, there are several factor to consider versus conventional technology companies.

There were lots of events organised throughout the program itself where you could get to know the other interns. This included the charity challenge where we tried to raise as much money as we could throughout the program by running events. However, there was a little lack of uptake on these events apart from those organised centrally.

I stayed on the other side of London with my family so I didn't have to live in the area or pay rent so it is difficult to say. The train fair is a little pricey especially around London. However, in Welwyn Garden City itself, it isn't too bad due to the distance away from London.

The nightlife wasn't great. There are a couple of pubs in the surrounding area where people would go out to but apart from that it is a very quite area. For a real night out you are looking to travel into London itself. Mainly a commuter town so a busy train station and shopping centre but not much else apart from restaurants and pubs.

Mainly sporting activities such as football matches between teams or the gym within work. There were also plenty of charity events going on such as the 'Race for Life' which is good fun to take part in. However, other than that it was very limited and most things were involved in work. Although there was a Hackathon which was good fun in technology.