Manufacturing Technology Engineering Industrial Placement Student Review

Definitely took much longer to do something in a big organisation, like this, due to all of the approvals required. You don't get anywhere without working in a team to finish projects however individuals have several projects they are working on at one time and so your project may not be their priority. The thought of spending another day chasing people often made the experience tedious.

People took an interest in my work but when I applied my degree knowledge and proposed a change, it was often difficult getting financial support for optimisation projects unless they had very significant savings or short payback time- but this can often be the case in any supply chain (which is a learning curve in itself).

Supervisor was supportive and really encouraging. We had regular updates/ meetings to see if I needed any extra help or was able to take on more responsibilities. I spent the month of my placement without a supervisor (due to their personal reasons) so just spent my time researching and reading about potential optimisation projects.

It really varied. there was never a steady flow of work. Slow in the first half of placement and second half was full of lab work to be done which required lots of overtime (not much variety of work).

I was assigned to some huge priority projects... unfortunately these were very long and so I could only finish the feasibility work. This gave visibility to my work and gave me opportunities to network with influential people.

Found it really difficult to apply my university skills to the job (even though they advertised for undergrads in my degree course). Had to work very hard to thread my uni knowledge into the industrial experience to write a dissertation on it.

Okay office dynamic. Full of football talk though... and not much else.

I think I had to set up a lot of my internship; which taught me a lot about the business and interpersonal side of things but meant I could only really work the project, that I was there to do, for half of my placement.

At times I needed to push for it, but I experienced great opportunities across the different roles in the company. The 'career development' training organised by HR for all undergrad and grad employees were very well executed but not approved with individual site supervisors. There were instances where my supervisor expressed some discontent with me going to a training eventhough it was internally organised and mandatory!

Got an offer to prolong my placement due to good work already done. To secure a grad job with them I would still need to go through the application process.

Got to hang out with other student during training sessions. Had a lot fun but would have liked to see them more often!

Cheap- affordable with the salary provided

Better to go a bit further out of town for the nice bars/ restaurants.

Yes, google it. Although its better to ask at work for a better insight.