Summer Analyst Review

I was an Economist Intern for the summer, working on a variety of projects to model the economic impacts of various investments and activities. I was quite busy but not to a detrimental extent. Typically I would work from 9 to 5 and on some days I stayed behind for a few hours however, the workload was manageable at all times. The fact that the projects were interesting helped in this respect, otherwise it could have been worse.

A lot - I learnt how to apply all of the economic theory I have been learning at university into their practical uses whereas previously I had not seen the real-world application of many of the techniques I learnt in my course at university. this made the entire internship worthwhile. I had plenty of opportunities to learn how to use different types of Econometric software such as STATA, EViews and R as well as brushing up on my Microsoft Office knowledge. I was also briefed on how to create meaningful presentations for clients and how to interact with them in a professional manner.

A lot of responsibility - mainly for the more technical aspects of our projects e.g. data collection and surveying. This I feel took a lot of the pressure off the more senior members of our teams as it was important to be accurate. Nevertheless, this too was manageable to a large extent. The responsibility grew over the weeks as I became acquainted with the work, which enabled me to have a full understanding of taking on projects by the time I left.

A lot of support as they helped us to apply what we've learnt at university to the specific software packages they use for regression modelling (e.g. STATA and Excel) for analysis of their data. I was able to sit in on meetings for different teams, which helped me to understand the work at the company fully. More contact with them from the when we were first offered out internships would have been nice.

Great - we all shared an interest in economics and politics which enabled many conversations both of the work and of outside interests to be had. This helped with our overall productivity. It also helped that there were people from a wide range of backgrounds working at ONS so this was quite special. An unpretentious environment was created and there was no real sense of competition among interns. We were all there to learn and in this respect were in a similar boat, and this created a good atmosphere among all interns throughout our time working at ONS.

Very much so - the work was interesting with sufficient variety in a subject that has a reputation for being a 'dismal science'. ONS made it very interesting for interns by asking us prior to the internship about our specific interests within economics, so they made an effort to match up up to suitable projects. We were treated in the same manner as current employees. They made a point of viewing us as potential employees and this was really drilled into in the way that we were given responsibility right from the beginning of our internship to the end in terms of the workload.

Yes

The internship programme is very good with the caveat that it is very Economics focus so if one wants to go into a more general data science/statistics field, they would be well advised to work for the GSS rather than the GES stream. I am currently weighing up exactly what I want to pursue, but this internship has no doubt given me an upper hand when it comes to graduate applications. A variety of work experiences is great, but this internship gives a huge advantage,