Software Engineer Review

Overall the internship is a great mixture of enjoyable and challenging. The company seems to genuinely value its interns and you are given work which you can really get your teeth into. At the same time it is not super high pressured and activities aside from work are great fun.

Although you are still 'just an intern' plenty of the workforce have done internships at the company and you have a very specific role that you need to fulfil. You are encouraged to learn and improve and the work that you do will genuinely end up being used in some way by the company.

You are given a manager and a mentor and assigned to a team of about 5. They are always more than happy to help you and your mentor is constantly there to aide you and answer questions.

Due to the nature of my work there were times when I was waiting for tests to run or for huge codebases to compile and so had to wait around but aside from that you are asked how quickly you think you can do the work and you then can try to live up to that so if you can't finish in time then it will be the prediction that was wrong and you are not pressured into stressful working.

You are given a specific task to work on. The nature of the internship is that you will not be working on anything that is hugely integral to the company because they will have their best engineers doing that however you do have complete free reign over the area that you are given.

I have learn a huge amount about coding and how to interpret large bodies of what would have been scary looking code. I now feel far more equipped to deal with my Computer Science modules and university as well as approaching software engineering in general in the future.

The office is a great mixture of relaxed and hard working. On Friday we had cake day in which one member of the floor brought in cake and we all took half an hour off to chat and eat cake!

It is obvious that the company has been running these internships for a long time. The information about what we needed to do was always there and even before I turned up I had a good grasp of what I would be doing and how I needed to prepare (which wasn't very much).

The company clearly runs its internship scheme with an eye to graduate recruitment and as such you are trained up as if you were going to be required to work at the company in the future. You are given a training and development plan and your progress is tracked over the time you are there.

The company is a great one to work for and if I do decide that I would like to go into the software engineering business then I will certainly be looking straight for Metaswitch. Personally I think I would like to explore other industries before I make any decisions but Metaswitch would be a great place to work.

The interns often go out for drinks after work, usually subsidised by the company due to some sort of welcome or leaving drinks. Via an internal IM chat and various social media groups we went on a couple of nights out as well during the placement.

Company housing is very cheap and Enfield itself isn't that bad however if you do venture into London then obviously the price of a night out tends to rise very quickly.

Enfield is not the place you want to go if you fancy a night out. Obviously if you want a big night you can take a 20 minute train into London however getting back late can be pretty difficult. Intern house parties seem to be the most sensible way.

From day one you are encouraged to get involved in the numerous sports clubs and other societies. We played sports as interns against other parts of the company and there is even a company wide competition during the summer. Of course none of this is compulsory and some people prefer not to get involved and that is fine too.