Student: Daniël Zomer Organisation: Stadler Rail Place: Birkenhead, United Kingdom
In the beginning of the 5th year, I got the assignment to do an international internship at a English- speaking company for a week. I immediately started thinking about a place to go but I realised I did not know anyone working outside of the Netherlands. Therefore, I decided to do my internship with someone else who maybe did know someone. So, I went with Mathijs van der Schoot to Birkenhead because his father works for the company that operates there. All the communication before the internship went via Hein van der Schoot and someone working at the finance support department where we would spend most of the time during the internship. We started looking for the flights and the hotel quite early so we would not run out of time. We managed to book a fairly cheap apartment and two flights with EasyJet to Liverpool and back. We also thought about the transport in Liverpool itself because the company was, with public transportation, still about 20 minutes away from our apartment in the middle of Liverpool. We went to Stadler Rail in Birkenhead in week 19. We did many tasks and we have seen many sides of the company. The company takes care of the maintenance of all trains in and around Liverpool. Stadler Rail was founded in Switzerland and has now spread out through Europe and even has a department in the United States of America. We made an agreement with the company about the time we would start, because at this company the employees usually start quite early because they need to have certain tasks finished before they can send all the trains out for the rush hour and we did not really want to start that early, which our correspondent already assumed. First day, directly after we landed, we went with Mathijs’ father with the taxi to the company for our first day of work. We met the people we would work with the entire week and filled in some forms because of the overload on regulations in England. We first got a tour around the whole workplace and then we followed the schedule made on forehand and looked at the administration software to get to know it and later work with it and do some administration. After that we went into stores and did some filing and sorting. The next few days we worked some more in the stores and did some more administration with our correspondent. On Thursday we had the task to look at an e-learning module that they designed for their employees, but did not use yet. It was about fire safety and we ran through the whole module, received the fire safety certificate and gave some constructive criticism on it. We also did many interviews with all the different departments in the company, like Human Resource Management, Law and finance. We got a good view of all the different departments and how they work together. On Friday we made a presentation about the company to show what we learned during the internship and what we thought were points of improvement for the company. In the afternoon we took the plane back to Schiphol and enjoyed the rest of our May Holiday. The internship went quite smooth and I really enjoyed it. We learned about the different aspects of the company and even got a fire safety certificate, which we can use in our future careers. I would advise the next batch of students to begin searching for an internship, hotel and transportation so you don’t run out of time. It is also a good idea to bring stroopwafels with you to give to the employees of the company you are doing your internship at.