Benefits Practice Summer Intern Review

Very enjoyable – I was made to feel part of the team, the work set was varied and interesting and there was a lot planned for the interns meaning I gained a great deal from it.

2. Colleagues went out of their way to find work for me to do if I asked for some, even when I was probably costing them more time than I was saving them. Also they would take the time to explain the background to the work being set and answer any questions I had, which meant I learnt a lot.

We were assigned a line manager and buddy (a new graduate employee). Both got me involved with different client teams, meaning I always had a varied source of work to do for different colleagues. My manager met with me in the first week to discuss what I wanted to gain from the internship and did her best to accomodate this. For example, one intern asked our manager about work shadowing, and as a result, she organised for each of us to shadow a different senior actuary for an entire morning, illustrating how supportive the culture is.

There was always work when I wanted it, but without any pressure or strict deadlines – a perfect balance. As well as client work, there was a project that we did in teams of interns across the country (we were allowed to arrange conference calls to keep in touch with each other). The office arranged a number of training sessions to introduce us to pensions and some of the calculations we would need. We were also asked to complete ‘actuarial fundamentals’ (a booklet of maths questions) and a project on an area of pensions of our choice. If there was still spare time after this, there were lots of online training resources that I could browse through – there was always something to do.

There was lots of scope to take responsibility in the intern project, as we were given a fairly open brief and free reign on the project. Obviously it is not possible for an intern to have too much responsibility for client work, but as all work is checked and reviewed to ensure quality regardless of who does it, it means I was able to be left alone to do work rather than supervised permanantly.

The work in ‘actuarial fundamentals’ complemented my degree course, and introduced me to some new topics, such as select mortality, which I have just started this year. The training was very useful in piecing the world of pensions together, and means that I now have a greater appreciation of more technical news stories, eg. the switch from RPI to CPI indexing and the implications of this.

It’s a relaxed and friendly environment – if I went over to talk about work to one person, it is likely that the people sitting near by would join in the conversation.

At Reigate there were plenty of very useful training sessions and a number of activities planned in the first few weeks to integrate us. There were some delays in the application/feedback/contracts processes before the internship started, but as mentioned in previous reviews, this is likely just to be a one off due to the merger

The 3 interns in my section were given many training sessions, including three 3-hour sessions, each of which was taken by 3 actuaries, which illustrates the investment put into intern development

There were 8 interns at Reigate and we all got on well – illustrated by us all going to a barbecue in the last week at the house of one of the interns. As a whole, the office is very sociable; while we were there, there was: A trip to see T20 cricket, pub quiz, rounders tournament, family fun day, cricket tournament, mini-golf, beach volleyball, exam drinks and 2 meals out (one with all the interns across the country after our presentation day for the intern projects in London)

Reigate is within commuting distance of London so is pretty expensive, but socialising is nowhere near as dear as in London

As alluded to earlier, there are many social activities organised.