Actuarial Intern Review

Absolutely loved my internship. Excellent way to gain experience in both your career choice and the business environment. Would recommended internships to anyone who can apply as they are a massive advantage when it comes to applying for jobs in the future. It is also an excellent way to earn some money over the summer.

My colleagues were the best part about my internship. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming, it was easy to fit it. Within 2 weeks I felt like I had been working there my whole life. Everyone was willing to give you help and advice when you needed it. I met some lovely people and it’s always good to build connections in your industry.

All the time, like I mentioned above all my colleagues were always around if I needed them and I was never afraid to ask for help. There were many different forms of contact such as face to face, email, messenger, phone ect.. and so it was very easy to contact anyone I needed. Although I was never given a phone and so I kept having to borrow someone’s.

My word load was very reasonable, there were maybe 2/3 times throughout the entire 10 weeks I was there where I felt like I had a lot of work to do. But this was normally just before deadlines and so that is understandable. On a whole the word load was just right for me, I never felt too much pressure and for the most part I had multiple tasks to choose between to vary my workload.

Every single piece of work I contributed to was the real thing. There were no practise exercises or anything like that, all the work I did was actual spreadsheets and reports that were passed on around the company. So I would say a lot. But there was always someone to check it through afterwards (for the most part) and so it didn’t matter if I made mistakes.

My skills on many different pieces of software have become greatly enhanced. Excel and Access were used quite a lot and it would be fair to say I have a great deal of knowledge on those two. I also began learning the computer language SQL during my 10-week period. Finally, I used a program called Emblem for modelling.

Pretty poorly to be honest. I received confirmation in January that I had been given a place on the internship and told I would receive the contracts within a few weeks. A few weeks passed and I heard nothing so I phoned them and I was told I would have to wait slightly longer. I waited around a month and heard nothing again and decided to phone them once more. I was told very rudely I would just have to wait. Eventually I received a standard email telling me that I would receive the contracts at the start of April. Start of April came and still not contracts, it wasn’t until the end of the month that I received them. When you live with a flatmate who did his assessment centre, got confirmation AND his contacts within 7 days, it really puts it into perspective how bad this was. When I arrived at my internship I had not even been given a buddy they said I would have.

I’m currently waiting to be told whether I have a position there or not. This would be fine but every other intern has been told their outcome (a lot of them yes) but I was told that I have to wait to see if there is space at my office. In my opinion this is extremely unfair, I think that we should all be informed at the same time and not to keep some of us waiting. This relates back to the poor organisation of the company, surely they should know whether there is space before the internship even starts. It seemed that way with a lot of the other offices but not mine for some reason.

I was placed in an office by myself, and so I didn’t have very much communication with them. Even harder when they didn’t provide you with a phone, yet the other interns who were at offices together had phones. It seemed very backwards. I met with the other interns just 3 times throughout the whole 10 weeks, when we did meet it was only to talk about the work we had been set. We all got along really well and in that sense there was a good social scene, but in terms of time spent with them it was almost non-existent.

There were no opportunities at all. No social events are running unless you organise them yourself. It was a real disappointment for me as I was really looking forward to getting involved with colleagues outside of work. I live with a flatmate who spent the weekend playing for his companies’ youth football team and socialising in the evenings with them and so compared to this, it was pretty poor.