My Amazing Internship at BMW

The end of my internship was a strange time for me. At the start, I was surrounded by other Australian interns and colleagues, but as they finished up their contracts and my end date approached, my workload ramped up, creating a busy period. My final months involved a lot of learning and working simultaneously to meet my deadlines. However, this stretch was absolutely worth it and helped me go above and beyond what I had ever expected to accomplish, even at the halfway point of my internship. I was given the opportunity to learn many new skills and create something that will hopefully become a valuable part of BMW’s vision for the future and help them achieve their goals.

The skills I learnt were completely unexpected given my design background. They focused heavily on AI and involved helping to create a tool for AI training. Fortunately, I was given the support and freedom by my supervisors and fellow interns to create something that I am very proud to have been a part of. The last few weeks were a scramble to make sure all the other minor projects were wrapped up or ready to be passed on to other interns for further progress. It was both an exciting and sad feeling, knowing my time at BMW was almost over and that I would soon be returning to Australia.

In the second half of my internship, I also made sure to enjoy as much of Germany as possible. I joined a local basketball team to hang out with locals and woke up at 4 am every Saturday to travel across the country and hike (when the weather allowed it) one of the many beautiful mountains and trails. I loved having this balance, with a long but fulfilling day or week at BMW, followed by the ability to completely remove myself from work and enjoy my time in a foreign country however I chose, without needing to think about work at all. This was an incredible part of the internship, getting to feel like a local in Germany and actually knowing a little about my area in Munich towards the end of my stay.

Once my internship was all wrapped up, I had one last thing to do to truly complete my time in Europe: go travelling. Meeting up with a friend, I was able to flex my local knowledge by showing them around Munich before, once again, becoming a tourist and travelling through Austria, the Czech Republic and northern parts of Germany before heading home. We visited so many exciting places and historical landmarks in a short time, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to take time off work to go touring.

Overall, my internship was an incredible, challenging, amazing and at times daunting experience, but I would absolutely do it again in a heartbeat.

Dillon Holmes
BMW Group Design Intern, 2024