Commercial Pricing and Strategy Review

The placement was good. It was very interesting to work within such a huge organisation. It is a very interesting time to work within this company. My role was quite reporting-based, with many regular tasks. I feel like I learnt a huge amount through the year. I would recommend working fo Samsung.

On a personal level, my colleagues were very friendly and I got on very well with them, there was plenty of talk of fantasy football every Monday morning. On a professional level, I did feel like an intern, which isn't a problem, but I wouldn't say I was treated completely the same as a full-time employee.

I could not really have asked for much more support from my manager in terms of the assistance he gave me when I was still learning how to fulfil my role. I felt like he was very much on my side and wanted me to succeed. I was taught a large number of skills, especially on Microsoft Excel.

I had a lot of regular reports that i had to send out each week. How busy I was depended on how long these took really, sometimes this was longer than other times due to circumstances out of my control. If I got them done very quickly there was often other things that I had to do, but sometimes I did have some spare time. Other times I was very busy, but it never got ridiculous.

I was given total responsibility for my own weekly tasks, it was up to me for them to be delivered. Aside from these I was not given a huge amount, for example I did not get many projects that I was encouraged to take the lead on and organise myself.

The excel skills that I learned will be particularly helpful I believe. I have also greatly improved my analytical skills and attention to detail. I fully expect all of this to be useful in my degree and further forward. Although my role was quite specific, I think many of te skills I picked up are easily transferable.

The atmosphere in my section of the office was often fairly quiet because many people were on business trips a lot of the time. However I know that other areas of the building are a lot more vibrant with more going on. There was always plenty of casual chat.

HR did a good job of organising everything at the start, but then after that you are just left to get on with your job within your specific team. Personally my boss was good at having things planned for me to do in my first couple of weeks in the role.

My manager invested a lot of time to teach me many aspects of Microsoft Excel, which is the strongest skills that I leave the job with. The company offered many online training tutorials if you wanted to take time to improve yourself. There were not many real-life training courses available.

In the short term they are good, I know that the company is taking on more grads each year so I think there would be a far chance of going back. Further into the career the opportunities appeared to be quite limited from what I could tell, I think it depends on the department.

There was a large group of placement students and grads but due to the position of the office many people drove in and there were not any pubs within walking distance, so that made it quite difficult to go for after work drinks so it was a bit difficult to organise things.

Surrey is quite and expensive area, the rent prices are high and if you manage to get to a pub you will pay at least 4 pounds for a pint. It's fairly similar to London prices without having the benefit of actually being in London so it isn't ideal, but the salary is quite good.

There us absolutely no nightlife in Chertsey. It has many nice restaurants but they are expensive. There are lots of pubs but very littleto offer in terms of bars or clubs. The closest large town is Woking, which is better, but still doesn't have any clubs so you have to look at Guildford or London.

My team ran a lot of team nights and dinners. For example I went Go-karting, trampolining and to a Korean karaoke bar with work within the year. I think this is dependant on each team or department, there were not many company-wide events that everyone went to. There was a football club every week.