An MBA Success Story: Shruti Shah and her internship at Poise Group

Shruti Shah is an Electrical Design Engineer working at Siemens. Shruti did her MBA International Business from University of Greenwich and graduated in 2016.

How would you summarise your placement role?

I worked with two different industries during my placement – Pharmaceutical and Engineering. First 6 month I worked with the Pharmaceutical industry, in a pharmacy as pharmacy assistance. My duties were to handle the customer’s health and wellbeing queries and provide good customer service. Assisting the Pharmacist in issuing the prescribed medicines and helping to maintain dispensary and counter stock levels. This experience helped me to develop my communication skills, time management skills, problem-solving skills. The other 6 months I worked with Engineering industry, as an Electrical Design Engineer with Poise Group. My role was to understand the project requirement, engineering designs and checks, working with the different teams to deliver the project within the time frame and budget, presenting the designs to the client, client meetings and lesson learnt exercise for the completed projects. This experience helped me to enhance my team working skills, creative thinking, leadership skills and negotiation skills.

What has been your biggest achievement or source of pride of your placement so far?

I had very good communication and customer service experience from my first placement of the internship, which has helped me to improve further during the second part of the internship, where I was involved with many more extra curriculum activities, such as promoting young women in Engineering by holding a talk with them, engaged young engineers in an employer talk session to guide the prospect of engineering and business field. All the above and my management and engineering knowledge helped me to get selected as a finalist for the ‘Graduate engineer of the year’ at rail staff awards - 2017. I am very thankful to all the university of Greenwich staff and especially to the employability office who helped me a lot throughout the internship.

What would you tell to other students who are not sure about doing a placement?

I am currently working with a multinational organisation because I got the chance to do an internship while studying. It has defiantly given me a huge opportunity to look into the real working world and before I look for the placement, I already had some work experience in the UK. As an international student, this work experience makes a huge difference in all perspective. This experience has given me a glimpse of working culture, helped me to enhance my skills, the assignments during the internship has helped me to identify areas of improvement. The internship taught me how to utilise the different skills in different situations, which I learned during the first year of the study. I would say by doing the internship will help you to develop and give you more confidence about what you can do in the future. In nutshell, the internship gave a very good insight into what I want to be and more importantly how I can achieve it.

Do you have any plans for the future?

I enjoyed both employment during the internship and loved the working culture in the UK. Hence, I decided to stay in the Engineering industry. I am working as an Electrical design engineer, where I use all the skills learned during my MBA study in addition to my Engineering knowledge and looking to work as an Engineering manager in the nearer future. I am very proud to be a part of the University Greenwich alumni association and I am also helping the students as a mentor by joining the university mentorship programme.