First Year Summer Intern Review

The Internship was really enjoyable mainly due to the branch staff being really nice and helpful and the level of free play and responsibility given to me. As I was in the city centre branch, it was often really busy and challenging, but my colleagues still regularly helped me out when I needed advice.

They were all really helpful and nice, always accommodating all my questions and trusted me to handle customers by myself.

My manager was relatively busy, but she took the time out to have 1:1s with me. She also gave me the trust and responsibility to plan my own activities, using the intern handbook as a guide. What could have been better is if she had guided me through what was expected of me, as we only had that meeting on the last week of my internship during my review.

By the 3rd week I was performing tasks by myself and was often given the responsibility of covering the sales floor when needed. At the same time, I was required to complete a project, which meant that I had to juggle between roles. This made me manage my time more effectively.

I was given a high level of responsibility and was allowed to communicate and solve customer queries from the first week. This made me enjoy the internship a lot more than some of the other interns which did not have such privileges.

I definitely have a greater overview on daily branch activities and how to manage a branch effectively. I also had the opportunity to conduct training sessions for my branch and talk to plenty of customers, which would greatly help my interpersonal communication skills. However, it would have been even better to be given tasks that require a higher level of responsibility as the tasks laid out in the handbook were more technical.

We had fun and learnt a lot at the same time. Our training sessions usually had elements of fun in it. We also had days where our meetings were solely conducted for fun and was not work related.

There were issues with IT, but the rest of the internship was pretty well organised.

Personal training was pretty much down to my own initiative to learn as much as possible, which I view as a good thing as I was given the trust to plan my own learning activities. There was also mandatory learning which I had to complete. However, with regards to development, I feel it was lacking on leadership development from my managers and there was not a lot of guidance on this. This might've been due to the fact that I was my manager's first intern.

It is a global company so the prospects are really good and the people are really nice. However, would love to experience other areas too.

I live quite far away from everybody else so I didn't really get the chance to socialise with many people.

It is a relatively cheap city and I stayed at home so no complaints.

It is an alright place for nightlife. My internship is in the same location as where I live so I don't tend to go out as much

The graduate committee organised a guide dog charity day which was a good break from work. Besides that, we were split up into teams and encouraged to come up with our own fundraising activities, which my team did.