Internships at Sea Generation
Thank you for your interest in Marine Current Turbines Ltd. As a small company with about a dozen professional engineers and scientists, we do not have graduate positions nor do we have internships for which we get over a hundred requests per year! Furthermore we do not tend to recruit people for specialised positions, and the main factor we take into account is not so much the original specialisation at university but the experience gained since graduating. This also includes any university research if it is of relevance to our needs. Therefore whether you have a physics or engineering qualification is less important to us than what you have done in terms of career development. We assume any such person will be both numerate and have a good understanding of the laws of physics governing the design of the technology in any case.
It follows from this that we do not recruit people fresh from university - the best route into renewable energy technology is to gain solid industrial experience - probably with one of the larger "blue chip" type industrial companies.
Several of our key staff had no previous experience with renewables as such but did design work for major engineering companies; for example someone with direct experience with offshore technologies even if they are oil/gas or military can quite likely bring more value to us then someone who has worked in some other area of renewables which has less overlap with what we are developing.
In short you probably need to try and think what you would like to get involved with (design, R&D activity, analysis, etc) and then look for a job which gives you relevant "hands on" experience even if it is not necessarily in renewables to start with. If you are lucky you might find this in a renewables environment perhaps with the wind turbines industry which is growing rapidly and seeking new personnel. A good source of information on UK renewable energy companies is Renewable Energy World.
I hope this helps a bit. Thanks in any case for your interest in us. Hopefully we will grow in due course and need more staff!
