It’s World Environment Day! We’re celebrating by recognising the great work that our SME Interns do with organisations that are making a difference.
“Hi, my name is Emelia. I am in my fourth year of my Maths MSci and last summer I completed an internship with Rubbish Ideas as part of the SME Internship Scheme.
Rubbish Ideas provides products and services to their clients relating to improving the lifecycle of rubbish. This takes a few different forms, such as education, design ideas, and web applications.
One of the best things about working with them was their flexibility, from what area of the business I worked on, to what hours I worked, and the ability to work from home. I live in Cornwall; it is a beautiful place and an ideal location to spend my summer, but not necessarily the best for finding an internship, so the ability to work remotely was very welcome!
As I’m hoping to go into a career in tech, I was most interested in working on the website and data side of their company. They have a big focus currently on building a rubbish tracker for their clients such as events companies working with festivals. There were lots of aspects they were looking to develop within it.
My three key tasks were:
- Developing a way for a static report of the tracker to be produced
- Producing a repeater element that populates a specific set of items from their database e.g. a venue’s products
- Creating a map of all the locations a venue’s products pass through on their lifecycle. Like this:
Although I have previous coding experience, my work still required a lot of research and learning for me, due to not having worked specifically with web development before.
I was given the independence to work through these challenges, trying lots of things, some of which succeeded, and some of which did not. I feel like this allowed me to gain a lot more from the experience than if my manager had been following every minute of what I was working on.
“If you are reading this and are unsure on whether to apply to an SME Internship, I would definitely recommend it.”
It has allowed me to gain some really valuable experience and learn a lot of new technical skills which I wouldn’t have encountered within my degree, as well as paying me to do so. I was lucky enough to find an SME Internship advertised that fit my interests. “
The SME Internship Scheme
The SME Internship Scheme is open and we are currently advertising internships that you can apply for.
Check out our website for more information, and details on how to participate.
If you have any questions about the scheme, or anything else relating to careers you can speak to us on live chat.
Read more blogs in our “My SME Internship” series to hear about other SMEs that our interns have worked with.