Trustee Consulting Summer Intern Review

On the whole, the internship was incredibly enjoyable. Fellow colleagues were always up for a chat and in general the atmosphere in the office was light-hearted. There were always at least one social a week (ranging from Table Tennis, Badminton, Great British Beer Festival trip, Cinema, Friday Pub visit) which was great fun. The work wasn't that varied, however that is expected for a part-time job. However, there was always work to be done.

Each intern is allocated a mentor (who you should consider as your friend), a supervisor (half friend, half manager) and line manager (full manager). My mentor was very friendly, approachable and always took time out of her day to answer my, often stupid, questions. When she couldn't, she would always go out of her way to find someone who could.

There were days towards the middle and end of the internship where I had no training or ongoing work. However, there were various assessed exercises (namely, three presentations, a 'data checking excel exercise' and a 'letter writing' exercise) which kept me very busy at times. Whenever I was very light on work, either a message to my Mentor (who would go and find work for me) or an email around the office would quickly get work sent my way.

Just the right amount. Typically interns will do most of the initial work (after being given a detailed explanation by a grad/actuary) who will then complete the parts which the intern couldn't do. After this all work is checked by at least one other person. There was a great emphasis on whilst it is important to get things right, it's ok to make mistakes because your work as an intern will be checked by AT LEAST two other people!

My degree is in Natural Sciences, so this career as an Actuary has not been particularly relevant towards my degree. However, my transferable skills (Communication, Group work, Professionalism etc.) have greatly improved. The presentations (either technical or to the team) greatly helped my presentation skills. The more technical side of the work have improved my excel knowledge. I am now very confident with a large variety of excel functions (after googling and asking around)

The internship was very well organised. Each intern had a Mentor, Supervisor and Line manager which made it easy to know where to direct questions/ problems to. The first two days of the internship, all 16 interns were paid to go to Leeds and stay in The Queen's Hotel. During the Leeds induction days, we did ice breakers and were given talks on what we will be doing during the internship, what an actuary does, and the different practice areas which BW works in.

As mentioned previously, there was training given in the Leeds Induction Days (mainly numerical exercises and a little bit of excel training). In the first two weeks, there were several training sessions which were aimed to put is in a position where we could help grads/ actuaries with various tasks. There were about 8 training sessions which lasted around 1 to 2 hours. Admittedly they were quite boring, however very helpful later on in the internship when we were asked to complete the tasks we had been trained on for various clients.

There were 3 other interns in the London office, and 12 across the rest of the offices. Us 4 London interns built a strong friendship, had lunch together every day, went to socials together and had a generally fun time. The very regular (at least once a week) socials were always fun with a variety of people coming along (interns, grads, qualified actuaries, associates & partners)

It's central London so quite expensive. However, the internship is very well paid and everyone around the office knows of the crippling debt of interns so offer to buy a round or two every social. Occasionally the partners would step in and subsidise the whole social for the entire office! The trains were quite expensive also.

There were one or two 'Corporate Social Investment' events which are charity events. There were socials every week (one requirement of the internship is you have to organise a work social!) to Flight Club (darts), Bounce (table tennis), the Great British Beer festival, many pubs and badminton. Any activity you want to organise, there will definitely be a lot of people enthusiastic to participate!