Charity of the Year Project Support Review

I really enjoyed my placement; I felt like I was given relevant work at the right level of difficulty, and because I had personal projects I felt like i had a clear goal which made the experience more enjoyable. Everyone in my team was lovely and I met lots of nice people in the office.

My colleagues made me feel very valued; I was introduced by my line manager Charlie Young to the rest of the team very early on, and this meant that I could become integrated quickly and therefore I felt like what I did was valued by colleagues.

Initially I had a lot of guidance directly off my Line Manager, with thorough introductions and a weekly one to one. After the first few weeks, my manager had to spend more time in London, but she made sure that I always had guidance by having her assistant manager maintain weekly one to ones with me, and my whole team including both managers were always available to call.

I was given my own projects to span the ten weeks, plus a constant stream of tasks from the rest of the team. However, when my projects were being remodelled by other people, I occasionally had less to do than I would have liked. I usually filled this time with the intern's Charity Challenge, however, so on the whole I was kept pretty steadily busy.

I felt like I had responsibility over my own projects, but they were looked over by at least 4 people each before sign off, so there was no impression that I was solely responsible for them. However, I was definitely not micro-managed, and was given deadlines and reasonably important tasks to do on a weekly basis, so that required some responsibility.

With regards to my degree (Ancient History,) I don't think the skills I learned are particularly relevant. However, for use in the rest of my working life I think I learned some important skills; a lot of them were to do with comporting myself in a workplace, balancing workloads, and communicating with a team, but more specifically, I improved my ICT skills which will be really helpful in the future, and I learned a lot about how a business like LBG works.

Everyone was really friendly; managers were perfectly willing to talk to the interns and it was easy to make friends with colleagues and other interns. However, about half if not more of the office worked from home on a Friday, so the atmosphere was a bit quieter then, although the dress down day was a nice addition to the week.

The internship ran really smoothly; I felt like the induction events were organised well, and there were only very minor glitches (like name tags arriving late, for example.) There was a clear plan of work for me when I arrived, so that organisation was good, but my computer was 2 weeks late - this was because of a technical fault, and not general tardiness, but it did stop organisation from being seamless.

This was an amazing aspect of the internship; it was a case of asking and receiving, within reason. If I wanted to talk to someone in a specific division, or shadow someone from the legal department, or go to see how a branch works for a day, (all of which I did,) this was arranged for me as a paid day of work even though it had nothing to do with my actual role. I wasn't given any really formal training, but in a ten week internship I didn't expect any.

The prospects are pretty good; the graduate scheme, whilst it doesn't pay as well as some, is a very varied and diverse scheme offering a lot of opportunities. The internship I held in Responsible Business this summer would be a lovely full time job, so it was a great example of the type of work I could do and enjoy in the future.

The social scene was really good; I made friends on the first day who lived near to me, and have become very close with a few people. We go out at least once a week and then spend time together after work around 4 times a week. Bristol has really good nightlife, so we all went out a lot. This social aspect was mostly with the other student interns, but the staff occasionally did things like a staff lunch and a staff meal or networking drinks, and this was really good too.

Rent is typically pretty high, but Lloyds pay up to £100 a week of it, which means that even though nights out and drinks are quite expensive, as well as general living costs, I have a lot more money to spend on these things as I'm not paying rent.

Bristol nightlife is really good, but in the summer without the students it can be a bit quiet. I had a really nice time this summer and went to a few decent club events, and although it is a lot better in term time, theres always something to do and compared to other Uni towns, it keeps going pretty well.

There probably were, but I didn't really look for them as having the 9-5 job and a bunch of new friends to hang out with kept me very busy. However, there's always something going on in the area, so if I was looking I'm sure there would have been more!