Reservoir Engineer Review

The internship was virtual, and 6 weeks (compared to the usual 11 week summer internships run by bp). I always had lots to do and the support from my manager was excellent. The project was really interesting and I could see how my data analysis fed into decisions made by the team, which made the work feel worthwhile. I learnt a lot of coding skills that will be useful for the final year of my degree.

Everyone at bp is really friendly. It was a bit daunting sending people outside of the team a Microsoft Teams meeting invite for a chat to get to know each other, but everyone made time to talk to me (and offered useful advice). When I had data to present to the team, everyone was interested in what I'd done and I could see my analysis feeding into their work. My line manager called me every day to check how I was getting on, which was really helpful.

I think due to the virtual nature of the internship, my manager spent more time with me each day catching up than would have happened had we been in the office. I comfortable sharing what I'd done that day and was given useful feedback and pointers of what to focus on. I needed quite a lot of help with the context of my project as I had no prior geology knowledge, which my manager was great at explaining to me.

My project was quite open ended, so I was able to take it wherever interested me. I completed the initial task set for me by my manager within about 4 of the 6 weeks, so I then followed one of his suggestions for ways of extending and improving on what I'd done. Most days I had several hours of meetings (30 mins sprint standup, 30 mins catchup with my manager, 30 mins team meeting, plus usually a few others), and the rest of the time I filled working on my project.

I had a lot of flexibility on how I approached my project, so I made a number of design choices when writing my coding algorithm. My work fed into analysis by the rest of the team, so I gauged what would be useful for me to investigate from team meetings and from my manager. If I thought something was worth trying I was able to do that. I was also able to tailor my project to learn coding skills that I thought would be particularly useful for my final year at university.

I was able to choose the coding language I was using to suit and build upon my existing skillset. I'd never done machine learning before, although it was something I'd wanted an opportunity to learn about. The skills I've developed using scikit learn in python will directly lead into my final year project at university, and I expect it will be a very useful skill for my CV and for my career in the future.

The team were friendly and collaborative. They had daily sprint standups (a feature of agile working), and everyone listened to everyone else's contributions. This made everyone's work feel valued. Because everyone is working remotely at the moment, it did lack the organic interactions that would happen in an office environment. This meant it harder to get to know the rest of the team, and at first I felt quite nervous presenting my work in those daily meetings.

The direction from my manager and team was fantastic. The Early Careers team had clearly put a lot of effort into making the internship programme happen in a virtual capacity, and there were a number of training sessions put on for interns. However, there were a number of IT issues - I didn't have access to my team's files until week 5 of a 6 week internship. Also, we didn't receive the proforma documents with our job descriptions until about 2 weeks before we started. This wasn't too much of an issue due to the remote working, but had we been physically in the office I would have wanted more notice about whether my job was in Sunbury or Aberdeen.

The Early Careers team had organised a number of training sessions for interns - learning styles, ethics and compliance, agile working etc. The presentation skills training session was particularly useful, and this was followed up a few days later by us giving a sample presentation to small groups of others and getting feedback. A committee of interns volunteered to organise lunch and learn sessions - people from various parts of the business were invited to give 20-30 minute talks about their careers or the projects they worked on, which was particularly interesting.

I've been really impressed by bp - there is clearly a lot of change going on currently with Reinvent bp since Bernard Looney became CEO earlier this year. I think there will be interesting (as yet undefined!) roles within that energy transition, and I hope that someone starting in a geoscience type role will have a transferrable enough skillset to move into CCUS or renewable energy. I don't yet know the outcome of my end of internship assessed meeting - I am aware this year there may be fewer graduate job offers due to the economic climate resulting from covid-19.

There were intern socials organised, but I didn't really partake in them. At the end of a day remote working (staring at my laptop screen from 8-5), I wanted to spend my evenings doing something not looking at a screen for a Microsoft Teams call! I suspect the social scene would have been a lot better had everyone been in the office. However, the lunch and learn sessions were really interesting to get an idea of different parts of the business.

Because we were remote working, I was able to live at home. This meant I spent no money on renting or commuting near the Sunbury office (before the internship was made virtual, I was preparing to spend most of my salary renting in south west London).

I lived at home while remote working.

There were opportunities to be involved in intern committees running things like lunch and learn and social events. However, this would have involved yet more time at the computer on Microsoft Teams so I didn't choose to take part in this.