Meet Matteo, a BA Summer Intern!

British Airways trained me to become a student ambassador, allowing me to showcase the incredible opportunities for students and keep my relations with the company. After enrolling in university, I stayed active in my role of student ambassador and at the beginning of my second year I applied for the summer internship. I was lucky enough to be accepted onto the scheme which I am now completing.

My role at British Airways is a Future Leaders Intern. This is a three-month summer placement at the company, I am based in a department called Worldwide Airports where we manage all our outstations across the world. I work within the ground safety and security team, we are responsible for ensuring all the ground operations at our Worldwide Airports stations are running safely and efficiently. After completing my placement I will become a campus ambassador for British Airways when I return to university, this will involve contributing to outreach for our emerging talent programmes. Becoming a campus ambassador will enable me to continue my relationship with the company as I endeavour to join the graduate scheme.

My day starts off commuting to our head office just north of Heathrow, known as Waterside. Once I arrive and settle in, I begin reviewing safety incidents from the previous day to discuss at our morning meetings. We review safety incidents to ensure they are properly investigated and to mitigate them occurring again. This tends to last most of the morning, after lunch is when I focus on any other projects I’m working on. This will consist of holding meetings, data analysis, creating presentations and working with the rest of our global team. As part of the internship we also get the opportunity to shadow different departments within the company, this allows us to explore new areas and learn about all aspects of the business. We also work on different charity projects with our Flying Start team which are extremely rewarding and for a good cause.

My favourite thing about my role is the amount of different people I get to work with on a daily basis. As an intern being exposed to so many different people with so much experience is so valuable to help me learn. Worldwide Airports was such a welcoming team to work for and everyone went out of their way to ensure I had the best possible experience over the three months I was there.

The graduates were so welcoming when we started as interns at British Airways, many of them introduced themselves to us within the first week and we had networking events with them. This was so helpful to have familiar faces within the company and many were in the same placement areas as us, so they were able to offer us advice and welcome us to the community.

I was privileged enough to be a part of the team that was responsible for sending one of our new Airbus A320neo aircraft to the Farnborough Airshow. This was such a unique opportunity to be involved in and I was able to work with some incredible people trying to sort the logistics of taking an aircraft out the fleet for the airshow. I was able to learn so much about how different departments need to collaborate on projects like this. My role focused on ensuring the necessary ground provisions were in place for our aircraft to operate into the airfield safely.

To me the most important thing I’ve learned is to always try and say yes to things. Having a positive mindset and seizing every opportunity given to me has allowed me to have some incredible experiences at British Airways from having fascinating shadowing placements around different departments to working with our aircraft on the ramp.

• Try and convey your enthusiasm for the role and industry in your application
• Say yes to every opportunity you are presented with
• Don’t be afraid to reach out and network with people
• Ask lots of questions as this is how you will learn