Corporate Risk and Broking Intern Review

I have enormously enjoyed my time at WTW, working in the Bid Management team and receiving an unprecedented amount of support, exposure, and expertise in order to best formulate my views of the insurance industry and, more specifically, working at WTW. The people that I have met and the skills (soft and hard) that I have picked up and honed should stand me in good stead for the next steps of my professional life.

The way in which you are treated as an equal comes as a surprise given the horror stories that you can sometimes hear from interns in other industries. From the get go, I felt included, valued and dependable in all areas that I worked in, culminating in developing several relationships with colleague outside of the working environment.

My supervisor did an incredible job in passing on her experience and expertise in order to enable my to go out and talk to colleagues throughout the business and set out in getting on with work that she would otherwise have had to do by herself. Whenever I had a question, I did not shy away from asking, and she almost always had a worthwhile and valuable response.

Due to the nature of the team that I was a part of, the workload was significant from the very start and has remained so throughout. There would be days that seemed relatively quiet, but these merely enabled me to get on with other projects outside of my immediate team. I am grateful that there were no days where I felt that I was perhaps wasting my time.

This is the area that I am most proud of. From the start, my manager was able to establish that my aptitudes enabled her to depend upon me to do work in her absence or if she was otherwise occupied, and this meant that I was able to develop more and more working relationships with colleagues around the business due to attending and setting up meetings in order to help her.

Many of the skills that I have picked up are transferable to any industry, but particularly the soft skills required in the insurance industry. I have managed to drastically expand my professional network and developed an in-depth understanding of the work necessary to win tenders with prospective or existing clients.

The atmosphere was extremely enjoyable - my immediate team were welcoming and friendly, with lots of young faces and spirits, but I was also fortunate enough to muck in with several more senior colleagues in other teams whereby I was able to spend a lot of time after work and outside of the office developing our relationships.

In my line of work, the interns just fit straight in. There was no sense of offloading onto colleagues in order to gain experience, but rather we were deemed an equal cog in the system. The organisation of the speaker series events worked well and in time with the stage at which our research had got to for the overall intern project, enabling us to consistently tweak our material.

I received so much more in terms of training and personal development than I would ever have possibly imagined. I feel that I have been very much prepared to return to the company in the future, and have been given the appropriate exposure and skills to do so.

I would like to think that I have outperformed expectations to the extent that I will be asked back in the future. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time and developed good relationships with people in several areas of the business.

There was a decent sized group of interns who would frequently spend time together after work, attending football world cup matches in pubs, as well as cricket matches towards the end of it. These are people that I am sure I will be friends with for a very long time.

I feel that the cost of living depends entirely on what you want to make of it. Naturally, being in London is more expensive than I am used to given my university being in Exeter and living outside of the city, but ultimately these were all choices that I made.

The post-work scene in the industry is highly enjoyable as well as a good way to network with colleagues in the business.

Ranging from attending one team's summer party, to going to watch Surrey play cricket. Everything is very well connected and there are always people willing and able to get involved.