Student Placement Engineer Review

The day-to-day varies as to whether you are on your Implementation or Development rotation. In implementation most days will start with a morning meeting (these are daily or bi-weekly, depending on the team) in which you review the tasks you are working on and update your team members. Then you'll spend the rest of the day fulfilling a change request a customer has asked for, potentially attending some customer meetings, or responding to support calls from customers. In development, the day will begin with your teams stand-up. Then you'll spend the day working on dev bugs or system-wide change requests, improving the core product.

I've become much more confident in my abilities as a software engineer. I have learnt how to interact with customers, and how to work in a team environment. I hadn't done much SQL before starting, and I've improved dramatically both in that and C#, which I hadn't used at all before starting at Lighthouse.

I was given quite a lot of responsibility, as the teams I rotated on were quite small and I was entrusted with a lot of support calls and customer meetings. I really enjoyed the responsibility, and I think it helped me learn and grow at a much faster rate than I otherwise would have. I probably got the most responsibility when in the Implementation teams. I wasn't given much responsibility in dev, but that's mostly because of the different nature of the tasks and work to complete on dev.

The support offered by my colleagues was really wonderful. I struggled in the beginning with knowing when to ask for help, but everyone was really kind and gave me the space to learn on my own, while still knowing when to step in and offer a bit more guidance. The only thing is that everyone is quite busy in the company, so it is difficult sometimes when you have a question about a specific functionality that only one or two people know about. Other than that it was great.

The company culture and atmosphere in the beginning of the year was wonderful. We had 9 weeks of in-person training at the beginning of our placement, which was a really great way to get to know our colleagues and the other placement students. There were also frequent social events including BBQs and a Christmas Party. However, towards the second half of my placement, the company was acquired by Infor, and after that people were coming into the office less and it lost a bit of its small company atmosphere.

I really enjoyed my placement. I learnt so much, and made some lifelong friends at the company. I'm so glad I chose to do a placement year, and it worked out well at Lighthouse. The initial 9-week training was one of the main reasons I chose Lighthouse, and it definitely made me feel confident in the work I would be doing throughout my placement and I learnt about the MES product in a good capacity. The responsibility and praise I was given throughout my placement made me feel really valued and proud of what I'd achieved, and I'm really thankful for the opportunities I was given to improve.

Yes

Be open to new opportunities, brush up a bit on your knowledge about manufacturing/ MES/C# and SQL - but I wouldn't worry too much because I went in not knowing too much and I did quite well. Ask questions whenever you have them, there is always somebody that's happy to help you and no question is a silly one. And if you move down to Crawley for the placement - try to get out to Brighton and London as much as possible - they're so close and there's so many fun things to do there on weekends!