Summer student Review

Derby team were all super friendly and helpful. It was an interesting experience to see how an engineering consultancy operates and it was definitely useful. However the area of work ended up not being something I particularly enjoyed, just due to personal preference, so I wasn’t that interested in a lot of the individual pieces of work I was doing. However any CAD work was much more interesting. Despite not being a fan of the area of work I’m still glad I did it.

My colleagues were great, and they all looked after me and gave me help when I needed it. I always felt that they appreciated any help I gave and they seemed to find it useful having me around. The younger colleagues were also very friendly and included me in stuff besides work.

My line manager was very busy most of the time and so didn’t have the time often to support and teach me, however another senior engineer took over the role when my line manager was too busy and was always there for support and tried to make sure I had jobs to do. Guidance was always available but they challenged me to work a lot of things out by myself or to find other people in the office who could best help me.

Unfortunately for the team I was in the summer is a very quiet time for work and so there wasn’t a lot of work available for me to do. One of my supervisors and some of my closest colleagues kept looking for work for me so I was kept busy but sometimes there simply wasn’t anything. Also often what work I had didn’t require much effort and ended up being fairly boring. Sometimes however I did have multiple tasks to complete so it varied based on what was available.

From very early on I was working on modifying drawings which were submitted as part of a bid. Throughout my internship I would occasionally see some of the work I had done previously being used. Quite quickly I was given a lot of trust with these tasks and was only really checked at the end. However these were only a few tasks as my inexperience meant that there weren’t too many responsibilities I could take on.

I have already found some of the calculations I learned for a task on my internship to have come up in my lectures, which made it much easier to understand the lecture content. Also I now have an appreciation for what it is like in an engineering office and what is expected. And I also have experience with new softwares. However due there not being much work available during my time there I didn’t pick up as many technical skills as I would have liked.

The office was very friendly, and people would often chat while they were working. Generally everyone seemed to get along which made it a lot easier to join in. I felt settled in quite quickly as a result. Some of my colleagues also organised activities for the office which helped everyone be closer to each other.

Atkins doesn’t have a set programme to follow or any official training, it is all left up to the line manager, which while fine for me, could be different depending on the line manager. It would have been nicer if knowing of my arrival they had planned ahead for projects that I could work on.

While no formal training was given, colleagues helped me to learn anything i needed in order to help, however this was only when a job required it. As a summer intern only I noticed less seemed to be invested in me compared to the new industrial year and graduate employees. While understandable it was still somewhat disappointing.

At the end of my placement my line manger told me he would be happy to have me back after I finished university and while I am not returning to that team I am returning to Atkins for a year placement within a different area. Depending on how that goes I might be very interested in joining Atkins as a graduate.

All of the younger colleagues would have lunch with me and invited me out when ever they were meeting up out of work. They would also often come chat with me while we were working.

Personally I lived with family members while I was on my internship so my costs were very low. I was in derby so overall everything was as cheap as I’m used to.

I didn’t really go out at night so never experienced any of it to be able to comment.

There were some sport opportunities available. They also planned to hold monthly socials however during my time there none of these panned out unfortunately. Otherwise it was just the possibility of meeting up with colleagues.