Doing a placement was the best thing I ever chose to do, giving me technical and life skills I would have had no other way of gaining.

I wanted to do a placement to make myself as employable as possible to future employers and to experience what working in my chosen field is actually like in an industrial setting, prior to accepting a graduate scheme and being thrown in the deep end. I spent my placement year with RWE Generation, based primarily at Staythorpe C Power Station, though I also worked across the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.

My day-to-day varied wildly, but throughout the year I gained an enormous amount of on-site experience operating and maintaining large combined-cycle gas turbine power plants. For my biggest projects, I played a large role in the design, procurement, and installation of a critical Uninterruptible Power Supply system for RWE’s state-of-the-art fleet control room. I also spent five months supporting the full stator and rotor rewind of a 450 MVA, hydrogen-cooled generator. Along with supporting and leading electrical fault-finding in breakdown scenarios and assisting with HV and LV testing on transformers, motors, and generators, I travelled across Europe to visit different arms of RWE’s wider business, attended industry-recognised training courses, and spent countless hours absorbing invaluable knowledge from engineers with over 30 years of experience.

My university course prepared me somewhat technically, but in all honesty, nothing can really prepare you for a placement year other than an actual industry placement. There is only so much lecturers can do beyond supporting applications and getting you in good academic shape. My technical skills have developed massively by putting into perspective what I learnt at university on actual physical bits of kit, asking engineers how things work in the real world instead of the perfect, textbook world of lectures. Beyond engineering, the year taught me about procurement, the economics of the energy sector, and stakeholder and outage management.

For any students considering it, research the companies you are applying to in detail; it is 100% worth the extra effort it takes to go through the application process.

Finlay Harrison

MEng General Engineering (Electrical)

Doing a placement was the best thing I ever chose to do, giving me technical and life skills I would have had no other way of gaining. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t like to imagine going into a graduate scheme having not done a year in industry—I feel like I’d have to spend a whole year just getting up to speed with what’s what! Working at RWE has completely solidified my plans to embark on a career in the power industry. For any students considering it, research the companies you are applying to in detail; it is 100% worth the extra effort it takes to go through the application process.