Malvern Instruments Internships

Internships at Malvern Instruments

UK Helpdesk internship experience for a German Student

‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.’
-Ambrose Redmoon

My name is Tamara Hamberger and I decided to fly to England, because to get my EBBD-certificate (European Business Baccalaureate Diploma), I need to have an internship abroad for at least four weeks. And I wanted to go to a country where the main language is English. And so I applied for an internship with Principia School of Language, and they have helped me get to the place where I have worked: Malvern Instruments Ltd.
One of my other goals, beside getting the Diploma, was to improve my English skills.

So I asked myself: Will I improve my English skills? And will I feel safer to speak this language afterwards?

On my first day, Annaelle Bolton, an employee of Malvern Instruments Ltd., welcomed me in a very friendly way. She is a nice and courteous woman and always tried to help me as much as possible. In my first week, I was introduced to the team I would work with and all the instruments produced and operated by the company. As I’d never had science subjects in English before, everything was pretty difficult to understand. I’d only had business administration in English, which is also the reason that I came here. They showed me a demo of the “Mastersizer 3000”- one of their instruments.

My work at the helpdesk these four weeks consisted of identifying customers. A person sends a mail with some of their personal information, such as name, phone number, the name of the company, etc. If the customer was already in the system, he had an Account ID, which is a number starting with 100. Another one of tasks was preparing sales quotations, using the SAP CRM program. After my first week I was invited to join the customer training about the Mastersizer 3000. Then, I did the same work as before: logging customer requests and creating spares quotes for customers. I was even allowed to help the US Helpdesk. One time I helped Celestina creating a service order, which was fun. Well, that work I did every day, except one, where I helped Natascha, a co-worker, while she was in a meeting, to answer phone calls coming in from Germany.

In those four weeks I went to Birmingham, to Bournemouth, which is on the coast, and I went to London, so I’d seen more than just Worcester and Malvern, and it was a lovely experience!

Bournemouth is a lovely place! We went there on a Thursday and the weather was really nice.

London is a remarkable city! You have to be there for even one day! You can see so much, but one day was not long enough to see all of London.

All in all it was a great experience! I had four fun weeks and got to know great people I had a lot of fun with. The company itself is highly interesting as well, and I honestly will remember and miss every part of it. But I indeed have improved my English skills and learned a lot of new things to use in language. The whole trip was to me surprisingly advantageous. At the beginning I didn’t even want to go there and thought that it wouldn’t help me at all, but after these four weeks, I can say that I did not regret going there. And to go there, you have to overcome any fear that is linked to travelling and working abroad. Not get rid of fear, but to overcome it, is the key point to all of this. Only by that have I gotten such great experience and had so much fun.

I would like to thank all who worked with me over these four weeks, and I’d especially like to thank Annaelle because she was there when I had any questions and really helped me.

Malvern offers professional support at all levels. Our intention is to increase your laboratory’s productivity through the creation of a working relationship for the lifetime of your instrument providing service support, training and information.