Intern Review

I really enjoyed my time at EY. I was kept busy most of the time and given interesting tasks to do. One of the things which really struck me was how friendly all of the managers were - they always found time to meet with me and discuss progress and future career options

Lots of my team were away on client site and not around in the office but all of the people I met during my time at EY were incredibly friendly and supportive. They were always available to help with any work I was struggling with and to answer any questions I had about EY in general.

My colleagues and managers on client site were incredibly helpful when undertaking work on guiding me through what I had to do. Working in a regional office, there was a real problem with the all the intern managers and my counsellor being in London. It made it difficult at the start when I was waiting to be put on a project and made communication much more difficult.

My diary was very quiet for the first two weeks and I hadn’t been assigned a client project, though I understand this is a common occurrence, even on the grad scheme. After I’d been assigned a project though it got a lot better and I had the perfect amount of work to do and was never bored or overworked.

I was definitely given more responsibility than I had expected, although this didn’t come as early on as I had been led to believe. While on client site, I was given a client laptop and got to do lots of work for them, setting up meetings and phone calls with their employees and producing deliverables to be used with the client.

I’ve definitely learnt a lot of transferable skills working as an intern at EY. It’s been a great experience having to just get on with things. I’ve had to send so many emails and make lots of phone calls! It’s really improved my presentation skills and given me a really good insight into working life in a big 4 firm.

The people in the team were really friendly and we got invited to lots of their social events. It was clear that all the team get on really well and this made for a really fun and almost family-like atmosphere in the office. Bristol has great facilities like a ping pong table in the break room although there doesn’t seem to be much cross over/relationships between UK&I and FS which seemed a bit of a shame

Everything in London with the induction and final event was really well set up. However, working in a regional office it was clear to me that it wasn’t as well set up there. Whilst all the interns in London had intern managers on hand and had already had their projects assigned before we started, in the regions that wasn’t the case in my experience. In addition, some of the essential tasks we were supposed to carry out like partner shadowing were not possible in our office as the summer internship team wouldn’t fund travel to London (which was necessary as we didn’t have a partner in our service line at the office)

I did receive a lot of formal training in the form of online learning and my colleagues at EY found lots of time to explain things to me and help me out with my work. There were lots of chances for networking and opportunities to get involved with innovation work and business development.

EY invest lots of their time into interns and give offers to about 85% so chances are good. I would very much like to come back as a graduate in a year’s time. There are opportunities to move offices and service lines but the options aren’t very well explained at it remains slightly unclear how it works

The team in my office were really friendly and inviried the interns to all of their social events. The interns also got on really well and we organised a lot of our own events like lunches, nights out and day trips. My office was really friendly and had a great people culture.

Bristol is quite an expensive area - but obviously not anywhere near as expensive as London! I didn’t find costs an issue as I lived at home but for those that had to rent, there was limited availability and it did use a large proportion of their salary. Food and nights out are fairly reasonable.

Bristol is a really young a vibrant city and as such there are a lot of great clubs and live music venues to go to. The team really emphasised the importance of work hard, play hard so we did have plenty of oportunities to go out and let our hair down.

There was lots of talk about EY networks when we went for our induction although this didn’t particularly seem to be the case in the regions. I didn’t get involved in many things outside of work apart from the social aspect but I do know that there are opportunities if you know who to reach out to - one of the interns joined the netball team in our office for example