Hamilton, Scotland, United Kingdom
Having spent the two previous summers working at COWI in the geotechnical team, it was great to go back and join the Structural team. This gave me a good insight into the vast variety of projects that a Civil Engineer could be involved in and allowed me to apply different aspects of my learning. One large scale project I worked on from the initial design of a culvert headwall to sending off drawings to be marked up. This involved various hand calculations as well as using different software analysis. These included Tedds, Revit, AutoCAD and ROBOT. Seeing the progression of what I had learned from university coming into real life practice was satisfying and was great motivation to finish the final year of my degree.
Rugby coach for a variety of age groups and qualities as well refereeing different age grades.
After a successful first internship with COWI the previous year I was lucky enough to be asked back for a second time. Again, I spent 8 weeks with the geotechnical team working on a variety of projects. I was able to improve on skills I had learnt the previous year on softwares like AutoCAD and SlopeW. This was a good experience as I had had a full extra year of learning so was able to see theory I had learned during the year at university. As well as this, I worked to produce an excel programme to determine load distributions on a slope with a variety of soil nails. This involved varying the inclination and number of nails present as well as different soil properties. Once again I thoroughly enjoyed my time putting theory from university into practice in industry. At the end of my time I was again able to secure my place for another years internship the following year.