Chris Wickson, Alistair Lindsay, Oliver Sidwell and Ben Smith are the four co-founders that started Ratemyplacement.co.uk

The story of Ratemyplacement.co.uk began when four undergrads at university of Loughborough decided to go on placement in 05-06 as part of their degree, after finishing their placement and realising students do not have enough information before going on their placement or even finding the right placement, they decided to create RateMyPlacement.co.uk to provide students with more information about roles and organisations they were looking to apply for, to ultimately, allow them to make a more informed choice than they did.

They said the following on their website about their journey:

The Idea

The idea of RateMyPlacement was born over a few emails that were flying around whilst we were on our work placements. We found ourselves asking each other:
“If you could reapply, would you have applied for the same jobs knowing what you do now?”

After some research we found there were few other websites dedicated to work placements or internships and no other websites that allowed students or interns to rate and review their experiences.

The hardest part of bringing RateMyPlacement to life was deciding whether it was worth turning the idea into a reality. Is anyone going to bother using it? What happens if we are sued by a company who has been given a bad review by a student? Can we afford it on top of our already growing debt? After testing the idea out on our friends and Tricia Tape, the Loughborough University Placement Officer, we decided the idea may actually be useful to Loughborough students and set about making it happen.

Getting Started

The idea began to become reality after we met our website designer, Andy Higgs and were given a small amount of funding from friends and family. We had already extensively mapped out how we wished the website to look, feel and work (often a welcome break from coursework and revision!) so it was up to Andy to work his magic and turn the plans into the website you see before you (with about 12,325 developments, tweaks and improvements along the way!)

The Launch

We launched RateMyPlacement on 12th March 2007 to our friends and other students at Loughborough; within a week we had 50 reviews and 300 members.

NOW

The website is now a valuable resource for employers and future employees alike, giving greater power and freedom of choice to interns and providing a pool of skilled and motivated potential employees to recruiters.

RateMyPlacement allows students to view the latest placement and internship job vacancies and read about students' experiences on placement, they also offer application advice and top-tips to ensure you are well equipped to helping you find and get your dream job!

If you’re thinking about going on placement, you should definitely have a look at Ratemyplacement.co.uk before you make your decision.