GCN Engineer Summer Placement Review

10 week summer internship situated within the GCN department. Day-to-day work included lots of MATLAB programming. Work for the placement involved getting a good overall understanding of key concepts to then be implemented within MATLAB models. Project developed through informal catch ups with my line manager as and when needed.

It was definitely expected that I would undertake the work independently as much as possible, without the need for my manager to 'hold my hand'. To be able to debug errors, understanding existing code, draw my own conclusions from plots etc.. with some support from managers and senior engineers as and when needed. It was nice to know the conclusions I would be drawing would eventually impact future development and decisions.

Definitely grown MATLAB skills in terms of how many new things I have learnt but also my confidence in using the MATLAB environment as a whole.

Everyone in the office was happy to answer questions when needed, but was expected to have had a good go at solving issues, reading about topics etc in order to develop my own understanding. Manager was great at communicating in where the project was heading and the suitable next steps.

I would say the department definitely feels split up into much smaller groups who all hang out with each other or interact with each other on a daily basis so that can feel hard to integrate into for just general office chit chat or lunch times. However everyone is very friendly and happy to help and offer guidance where needed.

The work can be slow at times, but was nice to know there wasn't lots of pressure on to tackle learning new concepts and working on deliverables all at the same time. The work was very interesting and fulfilling to develop new skills and grow in confidence, all other summer interns were so lovely and we all got on so well together.

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