Commercial Junior Strategy Manager Review

I really enjoyed my placement. I had a variety of work to do and it was mixed each day which kept the placement exciting. There were some times of pressure but also times where I was able to relax so it was good to have this. I will be very sad to leave. I got the chance to explore further outside of the job and business unit I was in and was in control of this aspect of my development. This meant that I was able to arrange field visits and see different aspects of the industry.

I felt very valued by most of my colleagues. As expected there are a couple who treat you as an 'intern' but this was massively outweighed by my other colleagues who welcomed me with open arms and treated me like one of my own. I wasn't excluded from anything and felt valued when I contributed to discussion. Most of the time I did not feel like I was not a permanent colleague and was given responsibilities to reflect this.

My manager was brilliant and fully supported my development the whole way through my placement. We met on a regular basis and discussed my projects and she never made me feel uncomfortable or awkward. She was able to strike the perfect balance between keeping me happy but also pushing me outside of my comfort zone to things I may not necessarily have done before. She encouraged me to arrange external visits and was very flexible if I had to work my time around this.

There were times when I was fairly quite and spend time going through my inboxes ect but there were also insanely busy times where I was working under pressure and struggling to get things done in the day. I think they almost struck the right balance. It was difficult when my manager was in the midle of a big project because I sometimes felt that because of this I wasn't able to do as much during the day and as a result I was a bit bored.

The amount of repsonsibility I was given throughout the placement increased as I went on as you can imagine. I was involved in lots of things so I was the project manager type role for my team. I also delivered some business critical projects, one of them was in the first two months! I think the amount of responsibility I was given was the perfect balance, any more and I would have feel uncomfortable and it wouldn't have been appropriate.

The skills I have learnt will massively help me in my degree and beyond. Even just my excel and finance skills have improved beyond imagination. My project management skills have improved and I think that this will play a big part in my final year of university. The fact that this was a full time job was invaluable because this made me realise that I also need to treat university as a Full time job to get the outcome I want.

The atmosphere was perfect/. You are able to have laughs and joke around and this was accepted but it was also a place where you can sit quietly and get work done if you need to. My colleagues were great to be around and some of them really feel like proper friends to me. Most people were very friendly even in passing and I felt like I could never ask a stupid question!

The placement within my department was set up great and I knew who I was to be working with. I was given people to set meetings up with straight away so that I got to know the whole team and this was great. The HR department were a bit slow in getting everything sorted for me and being able to access all the HR sites but we got there eventually. I think a potential week handover in this placement would be perfect because my team didn't have time and sit through things like meetings and emails with me so it ended up being a sort of 'work it out yourself' thing.

I got lots and lots of opportunites for personal training and investment. I attended lunch and learns, a 4 day marketing course which was invaluable and we also got the opportunity to train and finish our yellow belt six sigma qualification. We attended finance training, first aid training, working smart training, digital marketing training and I felt like if there was something I needed I could ask and it would be looked into. But i never needed to do this!!

I would love to work at Pfizer head office again and I would feel welcomed back I am sure.

The group was very split but everyone that wanted to socialise did and I have made some friends for life on my placement. We did activities most weekends and made the most of our time there. The area in which I was in was a bit dead so we socialised in our accommodation a lot. Some student were very quiet and didn't get involved but that is to be expected in a group of 50 interns. I felt that a lot of people on the placement were arrogant and very difficult to deal wiht.

The cost of living in surrey is very expensive and this is what has put me off looking for a job there until a few years in the future. It was very different to my university area and half of my salary went on my house and bills every month. If the salary had been much less I definitly would have been put off of the placement because of the costs of having to live down there.

The area where i work is very quiet and there is not much around in terms of nightlife. It is a quieter area with more of a variety of pubs. However London and places such as Clapham are fairly close by train it's just the difficulty of getting home in the middle of the night that was the issue. I wouldn't recommend this area for someone who wants a great nightlife because the places that are around are fairly expensive because it is close to London.

There were opportunities but not much time. There were lots of sports clubs around and I also joined the local gym. The office that I work in also has a gym and they also have football, running club and exercise classes which you can get involved in.