Industrial Placement Student - Civil Engineering Review

My role was within the drainage team for Mott MacDonald, mostly working on the track and highway drainage associated with HS2. As part of this I got to:
- Conduct hand calculations for creating designs which are compliant with the relevant
technical standards. I will have some experience using CAD software to model a
design flood in InfoDrainage in the upcoming months.
- Produce plan, section and detailed drawings for submission to the contractor, helping
me become more familiar with the products used in designs and the design decisions
people have taken.
- Join in with design meetings both within my design team and with other disciplines.
- Write technical reports for planning applications

Placement students are largely treated as graduates in Mott MacDonald so you get quite a lot of responsibility. In my time I created designs, conducted calculations, created models and produced drawings for a number of different assets. Everything is checked through before being submitted by a more senior/experienced engineer and support was good to check through any ideas I had, but I was largely left to get on with tasks day to day and manage my own time.

My familiarity with using CAD software has definitely increased, the previous experience of using CAD software was using Revit in structures but it was good to see how drainage models are built. Most of HS2 is digital delivery so the models are quite developed.
My communication skills have improved, writing technical emails or discussing issues in meetings with other disciplines is not something I had much experience of previously. This is particularly relating to being concise and ensuring you only include relevant issues to make it simple to understand.

Support from my team was great, the more senior engineers were always willing to answer any questions I had or run through my ideas for a particular task. I got some ideas for any work I had to do for my end of year report for university as well which was quite helpful.
I did feel that regarding things like CPD training, there was much more support for the graduates than the placement students as there is a graduate programme. There didn't seem to be much geared towards the placement students for training.

The office is generally very sociable, they often have sports and social events throughout the year of which I've attended a couple. Flexible working is possible with a minimum 3 days a week in the office as a general rule. The office is always busy except Fridays which are usually very quiet. Don't really have any complaints about the culture in the office.

Most my placement has been very enjoyable, particularly the last 6 months where I got a larger variety of work, it did feel in the first 6 months I was stuck doing similar things but this did change. I definitely felt I was learning throughout my placement, there not much that was completely new but a lot of building up of knowledge I'd gained throughout university.

Yes