Towards the end of his Chemical and Petroleum Engineering degree at the University of Surrey, Omar Dilery realised his chances of getting a full-time job looked bleak. After understanding the need to add work experience to his resume, especially in the highly competitive job market in the UK, he began his hunt for internship opportunities.
As fate would have it, Omar received an email from his university where they partnered with InternMatch to provide students with an opportunity to be placed in internships. After successfully going through the selection process and filtering out various options as per his needs, Omar was placed at Clean Energy Pipeline for an internship.
Clean Energy Pipeline is a sustainable energy news and data company that deals with everything related to sustainability. Despite a worldwide presence, Omar’s engineering internship was mainly focused on operations in the UK. His main day-to-day responsibilities included data analysis and uploading data on customer databases.
During the internship, Omar managed to gain quite a strong fundamental understanding of how projects are undertaken in the UK with regard to sustainability and renewable energy as well. Thanks to his solid relationship with his supervisor Chen, Omar was given the opportunity to update customer databases directly rather than working internally. This was certainly surprising (in a good way), as he was given additional responsibilities rather than just being given menial admin tasks or chores that are normally handed to interns.
In a moment of reflection, Omar spoke about the difference between studying at university and working at a company. “It’s important to realise that in university it is all theoretical (knowledge). You never get a chance to actually see how it’s actually applied in the real world. Just because it’s theoretically possible, is it possible practically? Sometimes that’s not always the case.”
After completing his university degree and completing his internship, Omar noticed a keen interest from recruiters in his internship experience. “A substantial part of the interview would be about what happened during the internship, how I worked with people with soft skills, and also how I work in a professional environment. And I don’t think I realised the importance of getting some kind of professional experience when I was applying for my job.” The internship proved to be extremely crucial to Omar. Not just in a professional development sense but also enabling him to land his current full-time role.
Omar is currently working in a full-time role as a Mechanical Engineer at John Crane in the UK. He has credited his success to the internship experience he gained at Clean Energy Pipeline and the assistance he received from Katie Lander at InternMatch UK throughout his journey.
