Summer Vacation Student, Tax IES Technology Review

Enjoyable: good company culture, colleagues generally very friendly, and work quite interesting.

The teams I worked with always showed a lot of gratitude for my work.

I rotated between 3 teams during my internship, and in 2 of those teams the guidance was very good. However, in one team I was left to my own devices, although the team members were approachable, the advice they offered wasn't particularly useful.

Generally fairly busy, especially towards the end of the internship. But in the first few weeks there was quite a lot of sitting around and waiting for work (although an effort was made to give me something whenever I asked).

I was mostly given tasks that were genuinely quite important to the team, but some of these were a bit mundane, and I sometimes felt they underestimated me. However, towards the end of the internship, the tasks I was given became more interesting and more important.

Developed my programming skills a lot, which will prove helpful in degree and beyond. Also, I became more familiar with how to behave in an office environment which will be useful.

There was a good balance of conversation and quietly working, but sometimes the office did get too noisy and it was hard to concentrate. Most people were friendly and seemed to get on well.

I expected there to be more events for the interns as a whole, as this seems to be the case at other firms - I only met one other intern while I was there. They were also a bit disorganised at the start of the internship, and whenever I rotated onto a new team there was quite a bit of sitting around. There was some structure however (for example with the rotations) and clearly some thought had gone into what we should be doing.

There wasn't any formal training, but by working in the office and being given tasks / help by colleagues I felt the company was investing in me.

They made me offer for a graduate role and even agreed to defer it by a year so I could travel / do a Master's.

People in the office often went out for drinks or other social activities after work and a lot of the more junior employees ate lunch together regularly. There were also free drinks on a Friday afternoon / evening at the end of each month. Although I didn't personally get involved, I know there are also a lot of sports clubs (and other activities) that full time employees can get involved in.

London - expensive! But when we went out for food or drinks after work, the more senior employees always paid for mine...

Can go anywhere in London from Canary Wharf, so very good in that sense, and lots of bars in Canary Wharf itself.

Not really, but I did get to go on some sort of 'away day' (actually in the evening after work) making chocolate truffles.