Data Analyst Intern Review

Brilliant experience: I spent most of time on client projects, following a quite extensive training (for an intern), so that I felt I knew what I was doing and I had the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the team. The people in the team, and their attitude towards me, really made the difference.

The project leader sought my opinion on parts of the project, such as which index to use or how would you forecast how the market is going to move. They asked questions about my suggestions and put some of my ideas into project. Being able to have the impact definitely made me feel a valued part of the team.

The practical support given was great, even when on a busy project my supervisors were happy to talk me through aspects of the project and gave suggestions for good approaches to tasks. I had a people manager who helped set my objectives and met me regularly to discuss progress and suggested ways that I could go about gaining the experience I hoped to acquire from the internship.

The first three weeks were quite relaxed, which was helpful to get settled in. I always had enough work to do, but I was not on a big project so I was not too busy. In the second three weeks, I was working on a deal driven client project. I was very busy. It was a great experience as I was able to develop much faster than I otherwise would have. Over the two halves of the internship, it was the perfect balance.

Working in advisory you will not be given total freedom as an intern. However I was able to work on live projects, being was responsible for writing parts of the report and being able to make meaningful contributions to discussions about assumptions that were central to our valuation model. I also had the opportunity to attend a client meeting very early on in the internship.

The training will be of great help. We were given formal training from Capital IQ and Factiva in using their respective research tools that would be useful pretty much anywhere. The technical training in different valuation methodologies and their application will invaluable in a full time role. The practical modelling skills I learned on the job will be helpful in my degree and beyond.

The office was friendly, pretty much everyone was happy and smiling. It was a work hard - play hard culture and as a result the team was very social, often eating lunch as a team, from senior members of staff down to interns.

Very well organised, formal training for the first week. When I joined the team I had a buddy and a people manager. Your work was organised by booking onto projects, which was handling by resourcing (who we were introduced to during our training).

We also had technical training, we were given a session introduction valuations and the methodologies used and when to use them. My buddy supplied me with work books and further training on valuation methods specific to my sector team.

I am keeping my fingers crossed!!

Dinners, drinks and lunches were often organised amongst the interns. This was not organised by the firm, but whenever the interns came together for a training day there would be some sort of social afterwards, and there were random socials during the internship.

It is London, also not the cheapest part of the country.

London has an amazing night life no matter what type of music or scene you like - if anything, you would struggle to get through all the night life during the time span of the internship.

Each project has a team which are responsible for keeping communication going throughout the account. This involves organising socials, sending out newsletters, organising account updates and so forth. This is mainly run by analysts so they love interns getting involves. This can also be done on a wider level through the different networks in the organisation.