ITRA Intern Review

I enjoyed my internship a lot more than I originally expected to. My service line was great for me as I got to do the more technical things I enjoy doing, and people were happy for me to be independent and do things I was more interested in. My colleagues were great and really made the experience for me.

My colleagues really valued my skills and made the effort to tell me this. It didn't feel like being a typical intern doing the bad jobs that noone else wanted to, and I really felt my opinions were listened to and taken onboard by everyone in the team (of all levels).

Directors in the firm asked me to go for coffee and catch up a few times over the experience. They were very candid and useful in the information they gave which I really appreciated. People were really quick to give up a lot of time to talk to me which was great.

I was fairly busy during the work day, but would never work more than 9-5:30 with an hour lunch, which was very chilled out for me. The level of work really varied with the engagement but I didn't feel unecessarily pressured by my work at any point in the process.

At the start I had less responsibility, as they want to wait to see how much you understand and how much you can be independent with the work. As people got to know me better, I received more and more responsibility, which I enjoyed, and it was good to make decisions about the work I was doing on my own.

I learnt a lot of technical skills, and things about accounting I didn't previously know. Learning SQL and tableau/spotfire will really help me in uni and jobs. I knew nothing about the accounting process or what accounting companies did before this internship, so I think this information is really useful going forward.

In my smaller team there was a great atmosphere- everyone was really friendly and happy to help eachother. In the wider area there was less of a close knit feel, but still everyone was really friendly. We had a lot of socials with my team which I enjoyed and appreciated being invited to.

I think I was lucky in that people I worked with helped me learn and gave me good projects. However, there was no official training days, and some of it was rushed. I think had I not had a good team I would have struggled to understand what was going on at the start as nothing was very organised.

I had quite a lot of time to spend training and learning new things, and people took time out of their work to help me which was great. We still we're doing client work which helped the team though, so it was a mixture. I had no huge training days or anything- just a lot of picking things up on the job.

I really enjoyed myself and it seems like a great place to have a graduate job because of the size of the company. Its good to know you can go back to a team you like and work well with already, so having the internship experience would really help me if I went back.

It took a little while to kick off whilst everyone got to know eachother, but around 2-3 weeks in everyone was really friendly. I was really good friends with other interns, and other people in my team. I never got lunch in my own and I went to plenty of socials.

Being in central London means it's really expensive to do much, but I think that's expected. More senior people were really generous and often bought rounds, and for some socials there was budgets from the company so I didn't feel like I spent loads on drinks and socials. Buying lunch was definitely a big expense though.

London nightlife is always fun, and it was good that everyone knew good places to go and was up for going out. I had a good time with my colleagues and other interns, but this happened more towards the end of the internship when we all were more friendly with eachother.

My smaller team was very social so there was often opportunities to go out and do things. If I didn't already live in London and have friends here the weekends might have been lonely though. I found loads of opportunities to socialise with a lot of people throughout though which was great.