Looking for an internship in your first year

It is important to emphasize that the UK-US concept of an internship differs from the Franco-German concept, in which universities work directly with employers to incorporate internships into their courses. In many other countries, including the Czech Republic, fully paid summer internships for students are relatively rare; elsewhere, they don’t exist at all. Therefore, I would advise students in the UK to look for internships there, and also to bear in mind that many UK employers have years of good experiences with students from specific UK universities. Such close ties between your university and employers may open doors you wouldn’t even know about abroad.

All students dream of a lucrative internship at some world-famous company. In engineering, prestige plays a relatively small role, and for this article’s purposes I recommend forgetting about big engineering firms. Usually, they only look for third-year students, whereas Cambridge engineering students need an internship by the end of their third year. This is because engineering requires a relatively high level of training, i.e. it is easier to employ a half-educated programmer than a half-educated engineer.

The fact that students’ careers are their own responsibilities doesn’t mean that the university can’t help. Big companies compete fiercely for places at careers fairs and spend substantial sums on various advertisements and sponsorships. Instead of them, pay attention to local, Cambridge companies from “Silicon Fen”, which aren’t afraid to employ students from lower years. As an engineering student you also have access to an exclusive database of companies which offer suitable internships, complete with contact details and “reviews” by other students.

“The sooner, the better” is barely true. Big companies do publish summer internship opportunities as early as October, but smaller businesses, more suitable for students in their first two years, do this roughly from January to April; it makes no sense for them to plan internships a year in advance.

There is yet another way to gain work experience: UROP (undergraduate research opportunities). UROPs exist to give students research experience, to prepare them for postgraduate study. The concept comes from the USA, where students usually propose research projects and compete for financing themselves. At Cambridge, UROPs work in reverse: academics advertise their projects (during the second term) and students apply for them. There are about 70 projects annually, mainly in the departments of engineering, computer science and physics; you needn’t work in the department where you study. UROPs run during the summer, last ten weeks, and are paid; they are internships in all but name. This is how I got my first work experience: at the Department of Physics, I worked on a computer program which is used in the development and production of the Large Hadron Collider’s particle detectors.

I know of two things which can make a first-year engineering student employable. The first is work experience even before university; this isn’t unusual in the UK, but I didn’t have it. The second is knowing how to program, and it is thanks to this that I found work. There is no scientific or technical field in which you can completely avoid programming. Therefore, don’t wait until you start university to learn it. It will prepare you for your course and be useful in itself.