Technology Intern Review

A lot - it wasn't perfect, but that was far more the fault of the pandemic than AMEX. There was an enormous amount of opportunity to learn stuff, and more importantly, tons of opportunity to chat with anyone you wanted throughout the company. I happened to be interested in a very specific aspect of technology, and it was very easy to set up calls and chats with people who were working in that very niche field. There were lots of social events and the likes, of varying quality, and to the best of their ability they made it easy to chat to other interns.

Massively! It felt like we were given a project that was genuinely valuable to the company, and it really does feel like the work we have done is going to be in place for a long time. We were fully able to decide the details of the nature and scope of our work, so it was very easy to figure out how to make sure you were contributing something worthwhile the entire way through the process.

Any help asked for was given. Whenever we had technologies we were all super unfamiliar with, it was very easy to get in contact with a senior engineer who knew more and was more than up for setting up a training call for us. I have to say the project leaders were quite hands off with us, but this was exactly what we wanted, and they were 100% there for us to ping questions off as and when we needed.

As busy as you wanted to be, really. At the end of the day it is a corporate environment, so you can expect to be in a lot of meetings or work calls. This was definitely exacerbated this year since everyone was working from home, but still only occasionally felt like too much. In terms of project work, we took on a lot of work because we were genuinely really interested in the project, but we very often took good chunks out of the day to just catch up with people, play games, etc.

Every bit as much as the regular senior engineers. We all had full rights to do (and break!) everything to the same extent the full time employees did, we self organised and set up meetings as a group ourselves, and joined in with all the regular cross-team talks and showcases. That's not to say we were left on our own, we certainly had soft nudges at the beginning, but the training wheels weren't needed for long and we were left pretty much to our own devices.

I'm not a computer science student, so the training, all being Technological, was pretty much entirely new to me. I definitely learnt an enormous amount about how this stuff is put into practice in the workplace, and since I plan on a career in software development this was all very valuable. Having said that, I think some of the training was a bit over the top personally, a bit too 'managerial', though there was plenty of interesting stuff to counteract this.

We didn't have an office unfortunately!

All in all, considering everything that was going on in the world, I was really impressed with the organisation. The leadership team did an amazing job of making sure everyone was connected, well equipped, and they sent out an awful lot of care packages to make us feel a part of the company. No doubt this was all super challenging in ways we didn't even realise, so I was genuinely very impressed with the whole thing.

They seemed to do a fair bit. We had a massive amount of training sessions for the first couple of weeks, to make sure everyone was up to speed on basic development practices and such, and we were able to request time with senior engineers throughout the process if we wanted to learn more about a specific thing. I definitely got the general sense that they wanted us to come out having learnt anything specific we were hoping to.

Pretty good, I'd say. There is a real feeling that the company cares about you, and the biggest indication for me was that so many people I met had worked there for decades. Clearly they're doing something right. I think for me it comes down to whether I can find enough of the very particular type of Tech work I'm interested in at the company, but being able to chat to people in related fields has satisfied me that this is probably the case :)

As much as was possible, yes. We played games over calls with people in other intern groups, chatted plenty with people cross projects, and the leadership team were always up for a chat. I suppose an accidental advantage of working from home is that it was even easier than it would have been to get ahold of people who were working in very different departments or areas to you. Because everyone was so friendly, everyone made themselves available as much as they could.

All at home :/

Pretty much no nightlife in the whole country during the time :/ Going to rate a 5 just because this was nothing to do with location. If we had been in Brighton, it obviously would have been decent.

Depends what kind of activities you're interested in. Tech-wise, AMEX has some cool 'inner source' projects you can contribute to, so you can leave your mark on stuff outside of your assigned project. There were also plenty of pub quiz style things going on, and social things like that which of course had to all be online. I have heard that the offerings have been much better in 'normal' years though, so I would expect much more would be happening in future internships.