Summer Intern Review

The experience was very mixed- on the one hand, we got to do some fun things and the company and HR team did their very best to give us a good experience, but on the other hand accounting work is just mind-numbingly boring and quite antisocial work, especially when you end up in teams or in an open plan office where nobody even takes a break to have lunch.

This depended a lot on the team you were assigned to- some teams were great, had lunch together and were very welcoming, while some didn't even really bother to learn my name, and generally ate lunch at their desks while typing away.

While the feedback system in theory is a good system, nobody really seems too bothered about using it- at least not for interns. My counsellor was very unhelpful, while my buddy was great, HR were also great and managers ranged from consistently referring to me as 'her' and being upset with me for asking for help with something, to being great at working out what my strengths were and give me work at a challenging but not impossibly difficult level.

Generally there was a quite good balance of working 9-5 or 8.30-5.30 depending on the team. I did have one team however which was either understaffed or just poorly planned out, and where I was made to feel bad for having to leave at 6.30pm. Working for 14 hours straight (essentially two full work days in one) in a team where the two others consistently talked to each other in a foreign language was not very fun.

In particularly one team I got to do a lot of different things, including working on streamlining some processes- work that I was later told they would usually have had a manager do. In other teams, I was copy-pasting from one Excel spreadsheet to another for days on end, which was less exciting- and then in some teams I was given responsibility for tasks well beyond my capabilities as an intern without any previous accounting experience, and made to feel bad about it when I needed to ask a lot of questions.

The experience has definitely been valuable, especially in terms of learning how to interact in a professional setting. I experiences working under many different managers, helping me to understand both what kind of manager I do and don't want to be. Mostly, though, it has made me realise that I need to work with something I can be passionate about- I met a lot of people who were fine with doing work they found quite boring because it gave them the financial freedom and flexibility to do what they actually enjoyed in their spare time, and who enjoyed the fact that there was a clear career progression laid out for them. But I realised that I don't work that way- I don't care if I get access to the C-suite while still in my 20s if what I will be discussing with them is accounting.

While there are admirable efforts to create big, centrally planned social events, it's the small things that are missing. People just didn't take the time to have a chat, or take a proper lunchbreak with their team and talk about something other than their work.

The internship was extremely well organised, apart from the fact that my counsellor was anything but proactive. I had to get in touch with her, after first tracking down her name with someone in HR, and basically all she told me was to go look stuff up on the intranet if I had questions. She didn't help arrange anything for me to do, that was all other people whom I reached out to and who were kind enough to help.

The company really invested a lot in making this a good experience, which I appreciate immensely- again, HR did an excellent job in also allowing us to try and tailor our internship experience to what we were interested in.

For a lot of people, I think EY would be a great place to work. This is a "it's not you, its me"-situation; I need somewhere with more freedom, more creativity, more drive towards a greater purpose to feel fulfilled in my work.

Aside from the pre-arranged intern events, I didn't really see much of any of the other interns.

Costs of living were fine, for the location. And because the internship was paid, it made it much less of a thing to worry about.

Fine, nothing spectacular though.

EY has everything from netball to a Women's Network, Volunteering and Arts clubs. There is plenty to do if you're interested.