Commercial Management Intern Review

I thoroughly enjoyed my internship at M&G - it's a friendly, dynamic company in which interns are really valued and are given genuine responsibility. The internship was very well structured, which helped me to organise my time, and meet other interns/graduates and smoothly adapt to life in the firm.

My colleagues gave me independent work and real responsibility. From talking to friends at other firms and from other internships I have done myself, this is fairly unusual. It makes the internship a good opportunity to develop relevant skills for the future.

My team and manager were available and keen to give me support whenever I needed it. In fact, they often went out of their way to organise catch-ups to make sure I was understanding and enjoying my work.

My workload did vary somewhat, but I always had stuff to do. There are various schemes/projects that interns have to do alongside their desk work, so if you're ever out of work, you can put some time into one of these. Unlike my contemporaries at investment banks who spent most of their summer without sleep, I was able to have an excellent work-life balance at M&G, which gave me time to enjoy living in London on top of my internship.

I think my team judged the level of responsibility to give me very well - I definitely had responsibility (from which I learnt a number of lessons), but I also never felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of the tasks I was carrying out or isolated by my independence.

I don't study Business, Finance or Economics at university, so the insights into Finance I have been given won't help me directly with my degree, but they should definitely help me in the world of work. Further, lots of the softer skills I developed - like time management, for instance - will be invaluable in the final year of my degree.

The atmosphere at M&G is great - everyone is very friendly and keen to get to know you. I had various meetings with people throughout the company in order to learn about what their teams did/to network, and the people with whom I met could not have been more accommodating in terms of giving me their time. My team also always made it very clear that I could ask as many questions as I liked, which I think reflects very well on the atmostphere and approach to interns at M&G.

I thought that the internship was very well organised and clearly structured. This enabled me to make the most of my time at M&G.

The first day of the internship was a training day, and then subsequently there were lots of talks to give us insights into different areas of the firm and industry.

I don't know yet - I find out next week - so I can't really respond to this.

We had various intern socials that were organised by HR, the interns organised two events of their own, and we often went out for drinks after work independently. The group of interns really got on, which definitely added to the experience.

London is very expensive, but you can definitely afford to live there comfortably on the salary.

The bars/pubs in the City are quite good, but I don't have any experience of nightclubs there (I think it's fairly well know that for clubbing the City isn't really the place to go in London).

There were various company-wide sporting activities and other socials that interns were invited to - I didn't actually do any myself but some interns did and enjoyed them.