Volunteer Fundraising Intern Review

I really enjoyed my internship here at Cancer Research UK! I've had an amazing team to work with, a great intern cohort and very supportive staff that I've networked with across the organisation. I've learnt so much about Cancer Research UK, the charity sector, fundraising, and work life overall!

My team was always very keen to give me feedback on my work and never failed to let me know if I was doing well or if I had been very helpful with one of their tasks. I've gotten many congratulatory emails in my time here, and it's really made my summer!!

My manager was great at keeping in touch with me and in making sure that I had enough guidance and support in my internship. We had catch ups over the phone ever Monday morning to see what I would need to help with during the week and to have my input on what I enjoyed doing the most and to try and fit work around what I liked. I also felt really at ease to contact him whenever with all of my questions, silly or not!

I think there was a good balance in the internship overall! I managed to largely prioritise my own workload and take up tasks surely and steadily. The first two weeks dragged a bit and didn't feel very busy, but I now appreciate this as I managed to get to know the (huge!) organisation really well.

Though I didn't have any large scale projects of my own, I was helping my team with managing supporter relationships, which involves a lot of responsibility in representing the charity to the public. I regularly drew up communications to our supporters and was even included in conference calls with them and was allowed to voice my ideas.

My internship really boosted my teamwork (as I had to communicate with different members of the team every single day to achieve project outcomes) and communication skills (through email, phone and Skype, as my team largely works from home). Most of all, my confidence in cold contacting people I had never met before has definitely increased and will be very useful in my future career.

The office is huge, modern, and quite relaxed. It's great as there's a really good vibe -people are very friendly and happy to help with anything you might need. Though people here work very hard, it's great to see there's flexi time (with people coming and leaving at different times) and that people are happy to come in to work every day.

The internship was quite well organised! It's good, with an internship cohort of about 25, to know that the organisation genuinely cares about your development. Many workshops and intern development days take place throughout the internship. My only small issue had to do with timings (Cancer Research UK let me know about my job with not much notice).

Cancer Research UK was very mindful of this, especially as university students and recent graduates early on in our careers. We all got project management workshops, time management workshops, CV workshops, a career lifeline workshop, and some talks by interns who have converted their internship into a full time job here at the charity.

There's so many different roles, teams and departments in the charity that there'll definitely be some interesting roles going by the time I finish my MSc. Throughout my time here, I've been encouraged to network with people in different teams to get to know what they do, so I will be checking the jobs board to see if anything I like comes up. The grad scheme (which consistently takes place every year) might also be an appealing possibility!

Yes! My team, though working from home most of the time, had people coming into the office often and we always had good chats and got along nicely. I've gone for drinks with my manager quite often, and we also have a big team social every month after team meeting. Also, the intern cohort was great to hang out with during lunchtime, after work on Thursdays and throughout our intern fundraising! Great people work here :)

It's London, so yeah, definitely an expensive city! But fortunately the internship's wages covered everything and I still manage to save some money this summer. There's always a few cheaper venues around the area (and we get work discounts in some of them), so it should be alright hopefully!

I've never gone out clubbing around Angel but I've heard it's a decent clubbing destination! There's certainly plenty of pubs and bars if that's your scene, and people will go along to these after work plenty to have a drink and socialise. Angel is a very vibrant and lovely area so I would highly recommend!

Yeah, there's been plenty! There are some yoga and exercise classes that employees can sign up for before and after work. There's also other stuff, like the different diversity networks (would highly recommend getting involved!), team away days and different after work societies (like softball, choir, film club, language club, you name it!).