Actuarial intern Review

The role involves working on your personal intern project, which they recommended you spend the equivalent of one day per week working on, and will be followed at the end of the internship with a presentation to a small audience. Additionally, you are assigned to four or five client teams that you will get involved with and help out with their work, such as calculating transfer values or working on monthly/quarterly funding updates. The expected working hours for an intern are 9-5.

I have had lots of opportunities to learn new skills and develop them. I have developed my abilities to use Excel, which I formerly had very little experience with, but was using on a daily basis during the internship. I also had the opportunity to familiarise myself with other software used by Hymans for calculations and displaying results. Additionally, I have really developed my communication and presenting skills. I had the opportunity to speak at a group meeting and obviously, there was the final intern presentation.

During the internship, I was given some responsibility. At first, I was walked through all of the tasks I was given by a grad or other member of the team, which was very helpful. However, as the time went on, I had the opportunity to show that I could work independently. I was also given more tasks that were of larger size or were due more urgently. There were very little opportunities to get involved with speaking to clients or taking part in meetings.

I received a lot of support and guidance during the internship. Everyone in the company has a people manager, who I met weekly with, and they were available for support and guidance. All the interns were also assigned a buddy; the buddies were recent grads who got in touch with us just before the internship began to introduce themselves and answer any queries we had about joining, and then stayed in touch with us throughout the internship and were on hand to answer any questions. There were also training sessions provided in the first week which were very useful.

The company culture and general atmosphere was friendly and quite relaxed. All of the workers were very friendly to the interns and would chat to you if they saw you. I also observed that the team were very friendly with each other and appeared to get on well. There were several socials hosted during the eight weeks that I was there which were generally well attended and very enjoyable, and helped me to meet more people.

I enjoyed my internship a lot. Everyone was very friendly and ensured the interns all knew that we could ask them any questions we had. It was also made clear to us that we did not need to worry if we took a long time on small tasks we were unfamiliar with as we are still learning. I had a pretty decent workload throughout the internship and I got to do a variety of different tasks.

Yes

If you are thinking of applying to Hymans Robertson, or any other company, I would work on making sure you have a good CV and, if you are still at university, get it checked by someone (e.g. careers department) or by a trusted friend. I also recommend that you practise answers to some common interview questions and prepare a few questions to ask at the end should you be invited to the interview stage of the application process.