Civil engineering work experience for an 18 year old

[RubyRedBoots]

Hi,

My son has deferred a uni place, to study civil engineering, at Newcastle University until next September and has decided to take a gap year. His reasons for taking a gap year are to (a) get a part time job, (b) get some work experience in engineering (in particular civil engineering) and (c) spend a bit of time working in Canada next summer.

Great, in theory, and I can see why he wants to try before he buys with the civil engineering university course but he is struggling to get (a) a part time job (supermarket etc.) and (b) he is getting no reply from civil engineering companies about work experience.

He would like to try a week (or even a few weeks) in a couple of different engineering areas. He is interested in airport and stadium design.

Are there any civil engineers on here who could point me in the right direction? We have looked at the big company websites and they seem to promote gap year placements. The degree he has accepted is a sandwich degree so he will get a year out anyway but this is more a dip in the ocean to get a feel for it - he is still undecided.

He got AAA* in his A-levels recently.

Hi OP. If he is interested in design he needs to try office based structural / civil engineering consultancies. A lot of the big companies have set intakes of placement / work experience students and can be reluctant to take on work experience as it can take up a lot of someone’s time managing and looking after them. If you don’t have a contact I would try some smallish local civil and structural engineering companies as they might be more likely to get back to you (easy to get lost in the system of big companies).

good luck to your son, I’m sure with those grades he’ll do very well in his degree.

Hi,

Yes, I do think he is more interested in the design side. His grandfather was a design engineer (sadly no longer with us).

I will have a dig around online and see what I can find out.

Thanks

He might struggle looking for a few weeks work experience. It’s a lot of work taking on students for work experience, they aren’t trained and won’t be useful in that short amount of time on projects. He also won’t get a feel for the work in this time as the first couple of weeks is usually orientation and workplace training. I work for the type of company you are probably looking for and we do proper internship placements which are generally 3 months - one year, and summer work experience for 6 weeks. We wouldn’t do anything outside this.

Hi OP, Can he get to London for work experience?

The area he's looking at is very technical and specialised, it's often really hard to "entertain" work experience students who haven't yet started university in a constructive way. Even summer students/sandwich year students tend to be really intensive to give them a meaningful experience with a year or two of university behind them.

If you don't have anyone you know who could help (and don't be afraid to ask if you do know and engineer), then the big consultancies might help- public sector bodies like to see them doing "social value" as part of contracts so they would be a good target. It could be worth trying to find your local STEM ambassador coordinator too as they might be able to help?