Intern Review

I very much enjoyed my internship. My colleagues were friendly and supportive. My line manager was helpful despite being based at another site. the office was ok, it was centrally located but some aspects such as IT could be trying. I spent a large amount of time on the phone to group IT in my first week.

I felt as if I had a contribution that I could make to the team. It took a little bit of time for me to realise this, particularly in the beginning when I was just learning about the business and the role of the team in relation to the business, Once I had settled in, I was able to contribute individual pieces of work that supported the overall work of the team.

My line manager was as supportive as he could be - He was helpful in his comments and identifying what I did well . What hindered the effectiveness of the support was that he was at my site maybe 2 days a week, this meant that for the majority of the internship I was supoervised by other team members. They were very helpful and I was not short of work to do.

There was a reasonable amount of work to do each day. This was mainly on an adhoc basis providing pieces of analysis and supporting commentary. I spent a little bit of time helping with business as usual things, and also a little time completing online training relevant to my job role. The work I was doing was enjoyable, and was a chance to explore different finacial aspects.

I was given a modest amount of responsibility, I was responsible for delivering all my pieces of analysis in a timely fashion - no one was chasing me to hand in pieces of work. I would have appreciated a couple of things to take the lead on in order to strech myself and experiecne a little more responsibility.

My communication skills and presentation skills were certainly improved as I had to be able to communicate any analysis in a simple and focussed way. I had plenty of time to use and implement advanced excel formulae and techniques as well as the opportunity to learn about budget modelling processes and practices.

The office was very quiet as a result of a very recent restructuring. For many of the remaining people, Friday was a working from Home day so there were often only a hand full of people in my area. It had seating capacity for 40 and sometimes only had 3 present. There were a couple of office events, which when they happened were very good fun, but day to day it was quite a drab environment. There was not much natural light.

The internship was very loosely organised and virtually all aspects were up to the line manager. I was lucky in having a good line manager and team who organised work for me. However the beginning set up was not so good as I had no initial log on or access to a laptop. The first computer I worked at was from the mid 90s and unbeleivably slow. Drive access as granted in dribs and drabs but for a few days I had a laptop, with no access rights.

There was little formal training and development. A few emails were sent around to see if I could spend time with different areas of the business however there was a low response and I never managed to sit down with anyone. I would have liked to have had a formal induction (none was given) and some role specific training (which was also not provided).

Future employment prospects are good. The company appears to invest a lot more in its graduate program which has funding and training time for formal professional qualifications as well as a series of rotations that give a broader view of of the business and the different roles available and the skills that one uses to succeed in them respectively.

No. There was very little organised officially or unofficially between interns. I barely knew the people who were sharing my accomodation. It was frustrating that there was so little going on. I tried to organise a few things myself but this was mainly with people and contacts that I already new, it was very difficult to reach out to new people as there was not much will to extend networks.

It was london, it was over priced.