Are internships for US companies different to UK companies?

[25percentOff]

My DC has been applying for summer internships for civil engineering, and I've been helping him by looking out for opportunities. Most of them look brilliant - very relevant with hands-on experience. But I saw one for an international American firm for which the description seemed less enticing. Top of the list was "Assist with tasks that may include filing, scanning, data entry, documentation, Power Point presentation" and then "Assist with responses to general questions" (which sounds more like a receptionist role than civil engineering) then vaguely "Assist with adhoc projects as assigned by managers". It also included some Americanisms like "Minimum of a 3.0 GPA strongly preferred", so seemed to be from a US template. My only knowledge of US-style internships is from movie stereotypes where interns are often portrayed as being treated negatively. Hopefully that's wrong, but I'm curious - if your DC has been an intern for an American firm, how was their experience?

I think it really depends on the internship, as there are many in the UK and Europe that have similar listings - filing, data entry etc
If the internship specifies hands on experience working in a lab for example, then your DC can get something useful out of it.

It’s a long time ago but I did internships in both the US and UK, and the work I did in the US was more challenging and varied and appropriate, whereas the UK company gave me very little work.

DD’s most recent US internship involved transcribing documents from the Civil War and helping prepare museum exhibitions.

I’ve managed summer interns here in the US and I usually give them some day-to-day work and a big project to complete. Sometimes the work is fairly repetitive but if they didn’t do it I’d have to do it myself, so it’s quite representative of what they’d be doing once they graduate.

@25percentOff My DH had a civil engineering and structural engineering consultancy and they still offer internships. (He’s retired)

Absolutely pointless doing filing! That’s an admin role and pointless for a civil engineer. He needs to look for site visits, access to design processes and gain an understanding of the business. Contractors might not be the best (and I don’t know where he’s looking) but I would look at a directory of civil and structural engineering consultants he can reasonably travel to and do the legwork with them.

Civil engineers don’t really have labs at work. Well DH didn’t! Academics do all of this. At work it’s not about research taking weeks. It’s about designing for the real world and seeing it built. Many smaller consultancies won’t be on site either because they are not site supervisors.

So my advice is look for consultancies and don’t go for huge companies with multiple branches. American companies aren’t usually consultants. Uk companies are world leading consultants and smaller ones are great for work experience in the real world of engineering. Look at the smaller players, not just giants!

Your DS could also make some speculative applications. DS's girlfriend approached a US product design start up company to ask if she could do an internship with them during the summer after her second year of a mechanical engineering degree. It is a small company and she had been interested in their work for a while. They had not had an intern from the UK before but they agreed to take her and between them they figured out all the paperwork. She spent two months working on their projects. They treated her very well and gave her a couple of days off work and free accommodation in New York when DS travelled to visit her.

@25percentOffDid you mean us company with offices here or just abroad?

Offices here in the UK

@25percentOff They might not adjust their web site for a uk audience! However as I said, spread the net much wider!