Intern Review

I enjoyed it a lot - I found that the office environment was very friendly and inclusive, but also that the company really valued hard work. The atmosphere was very motivational and you could work well without ever feeling stressed out. The staff were also supportive and I always felt that I could ask them for advice when I needed it.

I was working on real live code for the second half of the internship, and it was very satisfying to see my work being used by the clients. While the company maintains high standards of code quality, I felt that I was being encouraged to achieve more rather than being belittled for underachieving whenever I made mistakes.

A few of the tasks on which I was working were open-ended and unstructured, but this reflects the working environment: you're often told that a bug exists and have to find it yourself without anybody holding your hand, and I think that this kind of work is good at enhancing your programming skills.

It varies - while I had a reasonable amount of work for the majority of the internship, there were also a couple of times (between tasks) where I was waiting for the next task. Overall, though, this didn't have a huge effect on my experience of the internship as a whole.

The first half of the internship was spent on learning the various skills and technologies needed, and so naturally there was little responsibility placed on us during this time. However, after this I was working on a live codebase for a real client, and having my features and fixes implemented directly into their system, which was a very rewarding experience.

While the skills learned are not relevant for my degree, I think that they will be invaluable for my future working life. I started the placement knowing nothing about web development and came out (even after a couple of weeks) with a general knowledge of the development stack and how web applications are built.

The atmosphere was always positive and fun, and I always felt as if I was a part of it. Though it was relaxed, this never impeded the quality of work produced - if anything, the fact that I was calm and relaxed meant that I could better focus on my work.

The first half of the internship was incredibly well-put-together and thought-through - teaching so much in such a short timeframe is difficult, but the company did it very well. There was less rigidity to the organisation of my time when I entered a real project, though, and this sometimes lead to me running out of tasks temporarily. However, I wouldn't say that this was a huge deal.

The company seemed to really care about training me well and ensuring that I was learning as efficiently as I could have been. We had multiple talks from various members of staff as well as partaking in myriad exercises (designed and built by the company itself) in order to learn. I don't see how they could have done more in this department.

During my internship, I have gained a good grasp of how the company operates on a day-to-day basis and of what a future job with them would look like. Personally, I felt that the combination of a relaxed working environment and a persistent drive to create great products makes for a very alluring job proposal.

I was given contact details for the other interns before the internship started, which meant that we could meet up before our first day. This made it a lot easier to become accustomed to office life at the company. In addition, the other interns were all great people and I got along with them really well!

I was able to sort out my own accommodation for the internship and so I can't say much about the costs of the accommodation supplied by the company. Many of the company's social events were either completely free or heavily subsidized, which made it a lot easier to enjoy them while I was working.

I don't really go out to clubs etc. so I can't comment.

Bristol is a great place to get involved with almost any kind of activity or hobby.