Intern Review

The summer internship was highly rewarding and educational experience. It allowed me to gain exposure to different actuarial tasks and interact with a range of different people.

Everyone in the office were approachable and always made time to answer any questions I had. They also always made the effort to include the interns in social gatherings.

My supervisors made effort to ensure I was on top of my work and making progress on my assignment and tasks. There were also bi weekly meetings with my line manager and was given the opportunity to express my opinions as well as receiving formal feedback on the work I had completed.

Workload varied as the internship passed but I had tasks to work on for the most part of each day. All interns had to participate in a Cooperate Social Responsibility project, through which interns work as part of small teams to organise charity events and raise money for good causes. Hence whenever there was any downtime in the office I could work on this project.

Majority of tasks were real and necessary client work.

Since I would like to work in this field permanently, I feel the skills I have picked up will be very valuable for my future career. However these skills will most likely not help me in an academic sense.

The general atmosphere was one which was relaxed and professional. It was clear from the first day that everyone in the office were academic and majority held a masters degree with some holding PhDs, thus it was quite common to hear mathematical discussions among colleagues.

It was fairly well organised on the whole. It took a few hours to gain access to the drives and after the first couple of projects were finished I found myself having to go around asking for work. Also there was a buddy system but it was largely redundant as I did no work for my buddy and had little to no interaction in terms of work.

There was one training day at the start but the vast majority of things taught during the day were aimed at those working in brokering and there was no direct actuarial training. Hence the interns in our team had almost no knowledge of the actual details of actuarial work. However once I started in the team, my supervisors always made time to answer any questions and tried to explain as much as they could.

I have yet to hear back so I cannot comment.

The interns would have lunch together and there were a few social events organised.

Since the internship was based in central London expectedly costs were very high.

As expected for a city based location

There weren't any weekly activities such as office football. But there were a few events organised throughout the internship.