Summer Analyst Review

I thoroughly enjoyed my internship with EY over the summer of 2016. The team was exceptional at truly ensuring that I was given the best, most realistic experience of working at EY and as a result, I learnt a vast amount in a short span of time.

I felt extremely valued considering I was an intern. No team member ever asked me to get them a coffee unless I offered, and some of my feedback noted that I was "well-respected" within the team, despite easily being a decade younger than some of its members.

From the onset, EY emphasized that no prior knowledge was assumed, and to do well we should not shy from asking any questions we may have. My team were extremely helpful with any queries I had along the way. In addition, they often took the time to properly explain tasks to me, and never made me feel silly for asking any question, regardless of how obvious the answer may have seemed. Furthermore, the internship programme had multiple mechanisms in place to ensure that you were reflecting on your experience over the duration of the internship, that you were satisfied with the programme and were actively pursuing your set goals.

I was kept quite busy and was happy to be as it meant my days went by faster. I wasn't kept too busy such that I had too many late nights, and whenever I did my team commended my efforts and sometimes offered me the next day off. However, my intern-colleagues in different teams weren't as busy as I was most of the time, due to the fact that we interned over the summer when business is generally more quiet.

Admittedly I thought interns would be given more responsibility than I, and my colleagues, experienced. Most of our learning didn't necessarily come from direct tasks as much as it did from observing the work and tasks around us. For example, as an intern you may be given a document to proof-read, or make format-related changes to. Rather than learning from this experience itself, you would gain knowledge and polish your skillset via analysing the content of the document, asking questions and pursuing related tasks to get a better idea of a whole project. In addition, you can observe the nature of your team members' work. It's worth noting that it is understandable that an intern would not be given too much responsibility (especially at larger institutions such as EY) as the team first needs to build up trust in you and see what you can and can't handle.

I definitely learned a lot about myself and developed new/polished existing skills over the duration of the internship. Throughout my experience, my colleagues really took the time and effort to ensure that I was practicing various skills that would be required for the full-time role, and purposely challenged me so that we could all learn how far I could go. While the skills I gained may not literally translate to my degree, it has really helped me become a lot more disciplined, motivated and reflective - in addition to learning consulting-related skills that will continue to help me throughout my career.

My team was very sociable, energetic and driven, however it is worth noting we were an exception on our floor; the other teams were fairly quiet, although everyone was pleasant to work with.

There were definite explicit improvements made from previous years to the internship programme, and overall it ran quite smoothly. However, at times there were obvious delays or malfunctions in admin, which reduced the quality of the programme, however only marginally.

I think the company invested a lot in me as an individual for my personal training and development. There were a number of opportunities made available to us, both mandatory and optional.

I was fortunately offered a graduate role within the division I interned for, and will happily be accepting it.

The other interns were very easy to get along with, perfectly sociable and all quite hard-working.

Rent was quite expensive in central London, and socializing (aka via dinners or drinks) wasn't too cheap either. However, this is standard for London, and there are ways to find affordable rent. It was quite costly in terms of time as well, as sometimes I had work I wanted to do outside of office hours to save time over the week, however I felt it was very important to spend time socializing with your team members and the other interns as well.

There were a few bars and small clubs around as I worked in central London, and areas like Shoreditch were not far away.

There were a handful of opportunities that we were made aware of over the course of our internship; for example, volunteering with the EY Foundation or going to the Network (i.e. EY's version of University socieites) Social BBQ etc.