Risk Advisory Summer Vacation Scheme Review

It was good exposure to one of the more niche areas of professional services available, and I was thrown straight into projects that gave me a good idea of what went on. It was a little more audit-heavy than I had expected, but that's likely a result of the confusion arising from the rebranding of Risk Consulting to Risk Advisory/Audit Advisory. Most importantly though, everybody in the team was welcoming and supportive, which is probably the most important aspect of the internship for me as that makes a substantial difference to how much you enjoy work on a day to day basis.

Everybody was pleased to have the interns on board, both for the support they could offer on projects and for the exposure we were getting as potential future recruits for the firm. However, given the short duration of the internship, it was difficult to show your abilities and develop credibility beyond being just an intern.

My managers and supervisors for my various areas of project work took the time to explain to me the context and details of my work and were happy to respond to any queries I had that cropped up over the course of the internship, no matter how small they were.

Not busy at all, I was often left trying to find work to do or filling the time by finding some learning or admin tasks to do. I imagine this is partly a consequence of working in a smaller regional office, where there are simply fewer people who might have work to give you.

Not a great deal. Most tasks were support tasks that filled in small areas within larger projects. To a certain extent, this is inevitable during an internship when you're unqualified to take on serious work, but perhaps some internal research or thought leadership projects would have been possible.

Given the short length of the internship, it was difficult to develop any substantial technical skills during the internship. However, the six weeks provided decent opportunities for further developing professional and soft skills, such as use of Microsoft Office and client interactions.

On the whole, the Edinburgh office was quite relaxed and chilled out, and people were friendly and approachable. The people in the Glasgow office, where I worked for part of my internship, were equally welcoming but the office did feel a little less open, most likely due to the layout.

The workflow during the internship was reasonably well organised and accommodated our interests well, even if it was a little sparse at times. Occasionally, there were some last minute travel arrangements to Glasgow and Birmingham, which made things a little hectic.

There was a firm-wide induction and an office induction, but there were no particularly useful skills taught beyond the basic IT setup. There were, however, opportunities to use some of the online learning resources if you were so inclined.

There's a partner interview at the end of the placement, which can result in a full time job offer depending on interview (which includes a presentation) performance and general feedback across your internship. It is also possible to request a transfer to another office or service line, but this lowers your priority for one of those roles compared to the interns in that office/service line. In the case of a transfer of service line, you'd also have to go back to the first round interview stage.

The firm-wide induction was a good opportunity to meet the other interns from different parts of the country, and they were all sociable and good fun. The individual regional offices were relatively small with few interns so the 'scene' was slightly limited in that respect, though that's inevitable and not at all for any fault amongst the other interns, who were good company!

Relatively high during the Edinburgh Festival, though again this was pretty much inevitable. It's worth booking ANYTHING well in advance if you do your internship over the Festival.

Excellent. It's the Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe, the nightlife was as good as you're going to get during an internship, even if it made the cost of living higher.

Not many, though there was the occasional lunch/similar sort of event when you finished your internship, for example.