12 Month University Industrial Placement Student (UIPS): Data Science Review

Role involves communication, building dashboards, writing code, participating and presenting in the meetings

At the start I was given very little and easy tasks, which did not require much responsibility. Closer to the end of the placement, I was becoming more independent and had to take a responsibility for the whole project. It is important to note that most of my work was focused towards building proof of concepts or MVPs, and very little of my work was actually deployed in production environment.

I definitely became a better programmer and more advanced python coder. I've also learned very high-tech skills such as developing knowledge graphs or building agents.
I learned from scratch data analytics and Power BI dashboard building.
I've also developed soft skills such as communication, stakeholder management and navigating in ambiguous environments

I was given a list of trainings to complete during onboarding and a list of people to meet. Apart from that, there was not much support, the tasks were quite ambiguous and I did not actually know what to do. However, after I raised my concerns, I got help on getting an onboarding buddy, a supervisor and a mentor. This helped me to get through the rest of my placement.
The wider team and my colleagues were very friendly, and helped me with answering my queries. There were also metal health representatives available, and they helped me a lot.

I was surrounded by a very smart, very friendly and very hard-working people. There is an encouragement to take breaks and socialise with the colleagues during FIKAs. There are also clubs that you can join, for example, arts and crafts, board game club or a running club. Overall, very supportive atmosphere.

I expected that I will be located in the established team with a clear list of projects, defined objectives and a timeline for project completion. I expected to work on a single coding project, under a close supervision, and then present the results of my work at the end. In reality, I was in the team that still was forming, the tasks were very random, and it took a lot of my mental capacity to understand what is expected from me. This did become better in the last 6 month of a placement, but the first six months did not feel very exciting :(
I was very lost at the first six month of placement, and felt like I am not doing anything meaningful. I was seriously debating whether I should terminate my placement. During that time I felt like I didn't learn much, I had no finished work to showcase, and I could not understand what was expected from me.
This all changed after I raised this concern, and got a supervisor and a mentor. I've also defined and agreed development goals for the next 6 months with my manager, which helped me to get a rough idea of how the workload for the next 6 months will look like. I started to really enjoy what I am doing, and I feel like the last half of my placement was an amazing experience.
At the end, being exposed to a variety of projects instead of working only on the single one was more beneficial for me and made me more employable. However, navigating uncertainty and ambiguity was very stressful and quite significantly affected my mental health :(

Yes