I’m İrem Kaki and I was a student intern with Celestia UK last summer.

Doing an internship was a very rewarding experience as a third year engineering science student approaching my fourth year at Oxford University because it introduced me to the working culture of a small but growing company and provided good industry insight.

Having completed my third year modules on analogue and digital circuits, communications and information engineering, this was a perfect place to see these abstract concepts in action. For me to understand what is going on, learn more and prove useful as an intern, I needed a solid foundation which I believe my third year modules provided, so this is a position that is very well suited for engineering students in their third year summer.

The company itself was a wonderful place to work. The people are all incredibly smart, helpful and very lovely. As interns, our questions never went unanswered and we were given projects that have the potential to be genuinely impactful rather than being stuck doing busywork.  One of the advantages of working in a small company was that we had the opportunity to observe ongoing projects really closely in the lab spaces and even got to experiment ourselves.

The office is situated in the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, which is THE place to be for anyone interested in satcoms or space, and a generally great campus. On top of all of that, we had the pleasure of being invited to the annual company event in Edinburgh which was absolutely incredible and another great way to meet and work with the team.  

This internship helped me solidify my understanding of communications and improve my MATLAB & Git skills. I would recommend anyone who is curious about communications and/or likes a bit of coding to apply for one of these internships.