Tax Intern Review

Overall, I really enjoyed my placement at Grant Thornton. What I found most was that I had a much more enjoyable and useful experience when I was extremely busy with lots of different pieces of work rather than sitting at my desk with little to do. I had far more to do in the second half of my placement and not only did I learn a lot by having a variety of different tasks to compete but it was then that I realised I actually really enjoyed the work I was doing and the type of industry I was in.

Overall, I really enjoyed my placement at Grant Thornton. What I found most was that I had a much more enjoyable and useful experience when I was extremely busy with lots of different pieces of work rather than sitting at my desk with little to do. I had far more to do in the second half of my placement and not only did I learn a lot by having a variety of different tasks to compete but it was then that I realised I actually really enjoyed the work I was doing and the type of industry I was in.

The buddy system worked very well, as not only could I ask anyone anything as they were all sitting within close proximity, but it meant I always had someone I could ask questions and go to for help. Additionally, being allocated a 'people manager' meant that I could go to someone at a higher level for bigger queries as well as progress reports and goal-setting.

As I joined my team during a particularly frantic time with moving offices, during the first few weeks before the move I felt like I had relatively little to do in comparison to the latter half of my placement and subsequently I much preferred the second half. The other issue was that I joined the firm just before the end of the financial year and so a lot of the tasks that I would have otherwise got involved in, I wasn't able to because they were all right at the end of the process.

With the line of work I was involved in (tax investigations), it would be inappropriate to be given a high level of responsibility due to it's sensitive nature. However, the work I was given I was able to take complete ownership of and these were still important tasks for the day to day running of the team. During the latter part of my internship I was quite heavily involved in certain cases and spent a lot of time working on them which felt like a big responsibility.

I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I have learnt in just 6 weeks, particularly the technical tax knowledge I've gained. Tax doesn't really play any part in my degree studies (economics) but I definitely wouldn't say that what I've learnt has been useless in any way - my aim of my internship was to work out what I wanted to do as a career and over 6 weeks I have definitely learnt that, which is arguable the most useful thing to learn!

There is a good balance between a fun and a serious atmosphere in my office - everyone is friendly and very much enjoys their job but at the same time everything gets done with the upmost professionalism.

Very well organised - as well as the day to day work we do in our teams, we've been given additional challenges such as charity work, social media and presentations which have helped to organise the placement well and given an additional sense of progress and accomplishment as often 6 weeks isn't long enough to see a work project through to the end so the extra projects helped with this.

The firm sent us on a two day training course to their training centre at Bradenham Manor, which was an invaluable experience and taught me a lot on how to improve my presentation skills. I was particularly shy and nervous about presenting before this course but by the end I managed to stand up first and give a 10 minute presentation by myself, something which I saw as a huge achievement. The course in general was so useful for my personal development and I'll take those lessons with me back to university and through my career.

At the time of writing I've not yet been offered a graduate job and find out in about a week's time but I'm very certain that I would like to continue working here after university so fingers crossed.

I was the only intern in my department so less so with other placement students but the social scene with colleagues in my department was good and we regularly went out for lunches.

I commuted from quite far out so my commuting costs were high but I saved money in other ways to balance this out (particularly by not buying lunches in London and making them the night before)

I was in the centre of London so there were loads of things to do everywhere

There were intern projects to get involved in and also there are sports societies that I could have got involved in if I'd have wanted to