Summer Intern Review

Having moved from Leeds to work in the Kendal branch for the summer I felt incredibly daunted but luckily the team was incredibly friendly which really helped me enjoy my time at Enterprise. However the hours are very long with 7:45 starts and usually finishing after 6pm with long stints and working weekends.

In the Kendal branch we had great team of colleagues who worked together really well. At times it was very easy to feel lost and undervalued in the team especially with more limited knowledge as an intern. However at times the managers would really thank you for the work you've put in or buy pizza and chocolates to thank everyone for their hard work.

At the start you are really thrown in the deep end and expected to learn for yourself. You do get taught but you need to pick everything up really quickly! The managers have given some guidance but I really feel there could have been more support as after the first two or three weeks I didn't feel like you were trained or learnt anything new.

As an intern you are fully prepared for how busy it will be as you are essentially coming in to help with the busy season. I really wanted a role that gave me plenty to do and you were certainly never bored on the job! However, the hours could be even longer than I expected working up to 12 hour shifts.

Compared to my previous roles I felt I was given a lot of responsibility at Enterprise. As an intern you are trained with new Graduate Trainees and Placement Year students so you get just as much responsibility. For example you have the freedom to choose what to charge for upgrades or to give customers a discount at your discretion if they are angry and you feel this may help.

I do not feel that the specific training will be that useful in other industries as most of it was very car rental specific. However at the start of the placement I had two training days on customer service, sales and risk and I feel this combined with the personal skills of confidence and dealing with angry customers that I developed will be incredibly useful.

The atmosphere was fast paced and busy, though could be stressful at times. Due to the long hours staff were overworked which did mean that sometimes the office could feel flat as despite being a lovely bunch of people, everyone was really tired. Despite this everyone was really friendly and it felt like we all connected as a team very quickly.

My main issue with the placement was a lack of organisation. Though the recruitment process was well organised as quick it happened early on and therefore by the time my placement started in July I hadn't heard much and was worried I no longer had a job! There was one afternoon out in April which really reduced this feeling but was definitely still prevalent. In terms of on the job, I felt the internship should have been more structured to ensure you received more training and experienced more areas of the firm such as Marketing.

Largely it does feel like Enterprise are investing in you as they do really want you to come back as a full time employee. However as a summer intern it was clear that you were the last priority in terms of receiving any training just because you weren't there as long.

I will definitely consider working with Enterprise long term as it feels like a good start to a career and am planning on working with them as a Brand Ambassador this year. I do think they are a great company to work with but long term I feel I would struggle with work-life balance.

As the hours were so long and most students travelled around an hour each day to get to work there was little social life around work and Kendal was not a lively place in which to meet students. Towards the end I realised people were much more up for this than I expected but nobody had the confidence to organise this earlier in the ten weeks when we didn't know each other so well.

I lived in a spare room with a family and it cost £15 a night with food included so was lucky in terms of cost of living. In terms of cost of socialising I didn't really get to do much! Generally though I think the cost of food, trains and buses in the Lake District seemed fairly average.

There was definitely not much night life in Kendal aside from the occasional pub. Definitely don't expect much night life when coming to the Lake District as it doesn't really exist. If you did want a night out you could go to Carlisle but since I was living an hour away this wasn't really feasible.

Not really as we were so busy! There was a local gym if you were really committed and willing to go late and they do classes. On your days off you do then have three incredible Lake District just by your side but as I was living alone without a car it wasn't so easy and I ended up going home on most days off.