Product long-term quality audit Review

Working as part of the product audit team I had the chance to get very hands on with the cars produced at plant Oxford. I was giving plenty of responsibility and was supported where necessary. I was able to challenge myself with certain task and allowed creative freedom to look at new ways to carry out different tasks

Everyone in my relatively small team was very welcoming. They were able to support me both professionally and when needed personally. The wider group of people I worked with during my placement where also enjoyable to work with. I felt a valued part of the team and that any suggestions I made were being listened to.

My manager struck a good balance of allowing me to work independently to solve any problems that arose while also staying in touch with what I was doing to ensure I didn't make any wrong turns that could have been costly. It was helpful to understand what her was asking of me and also being guided to ask the correct questions early in my placement.

The work load I had was quite heavy although this is something I did enjoy. Occasionally staying a bit later to complete a task was offset by satisfaction of going home knowing that it was another things done. The most enjoyable aspect of my workload was that while it had some routine, the general content of the work was ever changing with the allowance to investigate things that interested me.

I was given more than adequate responsibility. Taking a fairly leading role in running the fleet of test vehicles and being responsible should something go wrong added enough added pressure to the role. I was given the opportunity to then go on and find other things I was interested in however the busy nature of my role limited me in this somewhat.

I have just completed my placement so I cannot answer this with full confidence however despite not being the most engineering heavy placement role I have certainly developed my understanding of the automotive manufacturing process and the quality and development side of this sector. The main development came in my soft skills and working as part of a team in a much larger company.

Great! The team I was working with had real personality with a mix of people from various backgrounds. They were very easy to relate to and admittedly the cliche term "Work hard, play hard" was thrown around a couple of times. Everyone remained light hearted while still getting the job done

Initial impressions on arrival were of slight disorganisation with myself and a colleague not even appearing on the system as new starters. This however has been listened to and approved for our successors however setting up the IT systems is still far too laborious and time consuming with too many hoops to jump through.

I was given training for everything I needed but nothing more. Having the option to take up German language classes for example would have been nice and to an extent beneficial. I believe the amount of training I received was adequate however not outstanding given I was ultimately only there for 13 months

While I would love to work with BMW Group again in the future the outlook for interns returning as graduates is not great with many more intern positions available than the very low number of grad jobs.

Yes it was good some students lived further away so it was often difficult to include them however generally where you engaged with other placement students they were willing to go and socialise with an intern social in a local bar every Thursday night organised by a volunteer social sec intern.

Oxford, in comparison to Belfast where I study was almost double the price for accommodation which was generally of a worse standard. Having to travel by bus into the centre also increased the price of already expensive nights out. As a result we tended to have more house parties to save money.

Oxford has a good night life scene however this is populated by pricey bars! I did enjoy nights out in Oxford and for the relatively few times we did go out I always tended to enjoy the nights with plenty of good stories to tell and people to meet when out.

Both my department and the interns regularly organised events however I don't feel this is something that can be judged as it is far more down to the individual partaking in the placement and their willingness to get involved than the actual opportunities. For example I enjoyed a great number of activities while my housemate did very little.