An Honorary Scot - Remi's Internship

The Intern

I'm Rémi Perrot, from France (Burgundy). I'm studying at the SRC Department of the IUT of Dijon. In the context of that school, I had to do an internship, in France or in a foreign country. Of course I chose the second one. But why did I choose Glasgow? My English teacher, who comes from Ireland, loves this city. She said to me that there are beautiful buildings, good places to see, and - especially - that the people are very nice. She was right at every point!

Why Parachute?

I sent a lot of applications to a lot of firms. But Parachute was one of the few that really interested me. I want to join an engineering school in the area of development, multimedia, telecommunication, and the IUT of Dijon is focused on graphic design, audio-visual, marketing, IT and networks. So, the type of work Parachute was doing was perfect for me. It will help me a lot in my future, because I was able to improve my English, and it will be a good point in my CV for the schools and jobs I will be applying to. But there is more than just the area. I went to Parachute’s website, which was very nice, and I also spoke to my supervisor, David, who was very friendly. And obviously I made the right choice: in Parachute I found nice people, interesting work and good things to learn.

Work & Learning

I worked on a lot of different projects. I did some front-end development, but also back-end. I worked on CMS and Ecommerce websites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. I also had the chance to work on networking by setting up a webserver. The things I learned were huge. Firstly, there are a lot of tools: I worked with some frameworks, like Laravel in PHP or D3 in JavaScript. I also used a huge amount of JQuery plugins, for sliders or layouts for instance. One other very interesting thing I learned was tools for improving my efficiency. I discovered SASS, for coding in CSS with superpowers, Grunt, for automating all the repetitive tasks, and GIT, for version control.

The Must

I enjoyed many aspects of this internship. It's hard to choose just one thing to speak about! But in the work part of it, I think it was the back-end development, because I like creating the “brains” of websites. In the cultural aspect, it's of course how the people of Glasgow are welcoming, and also the fact that there is no second person plural (used for only one person by politeness) in English. I don't know you, so maybe you know, or maybe you don't, but in French, you need to adapt the pronoun you use to the type of person you have in front of you (your boss, an old or young person, your friends, etc.). In France, the relations are more formal. For instance when we use the second person plural to speak to one person, we mostly use the name (and not the forename) of a person. So it was very nice to feel close to people, with fewer barriers than in France. I can't speak about all my experiences on this post, but to summarize, I had three great months in Scotland with Parachute.