Summer Student Review

I really enjoyed working for Barnett Waddingham over the summer internship. I was given lots of interesting client work to do, involving calculations and letter drafting, from the start of the internship. The office is newly built and a pleasure to work in, made better by the always friendly staff members happy to answer your questions and guide you in the right direction.

Although I was a summer intern, the other interns and I immediately felt welcomed by our colleagues. We were given client work from all of our colleagues, who then gave us great feedback on the tasks we had completed and suggested ways to improve in the future. We were also regularly invited on the socials which were always fun.

Barnett assigned us with a mentor and a supervisor who looked after us during our internship, and gave us training and feedback as the internship went on. We had a mid-term review meeting that was very useful to know what parts of our work was going well and which parts needed improvement.

Most days were busy with client work and calculations that needed doing for certain deadlines. We were also tasked with a project over the course of the internship, which kept us busy if the client work started becoming too complicated for us. Despite sometimes being quite busy the working hours were always the same, with no pressure from anyone making us come in early or stay late to complete jobs.

As we were given client work early, we had a fair amount of responsibility. However, as all of the work done in the company has a rigorous peer review policy, any client work we were given was always checked before being sent externally. We were given complete free range on how to best organise our time between the tasks that needed completeing.

As Barnett Waddingham is an actuary firm and I'm a physics student, the skills won't help me in my degree unfortunately. However, the skills I've learnt will be useful if I pursue a career as an actuary, and the softer skills such as working in a team on unfamiliar tasks and long presentations should help me in my degree and in later life.

The atmosphere was really friendly, with everyone working together on tasks and with no feeling of competitiveness in the office. what was especially nice was that the company partners were always happy to talk about some of their client work or how they had found training and working as an actuary for a number of years.

The internship was well organised from start to finish. In the first week we had a well run training event in the Liverpool office, which let us travel up to Liverpool for 3 days. Organising our positions in the office was well done to ensure our close proximity to the other actuaries and meant that we had a steady flow of work. We also had various exercises along the way which were well organised to give us good training and then feedback after the exercise.

We had a 2 day training event in Liverpool in the first week of the internship which prepared us for the basics of actuarial calculations. We also had a reasonably amount of time commited to training events when we started out our offices, mostly consisting of teaching by one of the student actuaries.

Future employment prospects with Barnett Waddingham are extremely appealing, due to the friendly working environment of Barnett, as well as the strong career path of an actuary. The office spaces are a pleasure to work in, and the actuaries are all very helpful as opposed to some of the competitive environments in other financial sector companies.

There was a reasonably social scene in the company, with social events held about twice a month, as well as weekly lunches out. The socials included a golf tournament, a drinks night for the newly qualified actuaries and a pub quiz night. All of the events were well organised and fun, made even better by socialising with colleagues outside of the office.

As the office is located in a small town, socialising locations are quite sparse, with the only options of going out being the pubs in the old part of town. As the town is also on the end of the metropolitan tube line, the cost of living and socialising was quite high compared to my normal prices of Manchester student bars.

The nightlife around the Amersham office of Barnett Waddingham wasn't great, with just a handful of pubs located in the old part of town. I knew this when I applied to the internship as I was happy to trade no clubs for lovely countryside. However, London is only a tube ride away, so any larger events can be easily held in London.

Barnett Waddingham has a football team which play once a week and also play in tournaments with the other offices. It also has a cricket team that meets occasionally and a running club. As Amersham is quite a small town there are some things to get involved with outside of the company, but they are relatively few and focus around the local sports centre.