ITRA Intern Review

I thoroughly enjoyed my placement at Ernst & Young. The people on my team were great, the graduates were very helpful and supported my learning to make the internship experience as good as possible. The biggest problem I ended up having with the internship was the duration; 6 weeks was a bit too short.

I felt very valued by my colleagues on my engagement teams at Ernst & Young, even members of staff that were not on my engagement team. Everyone was very friendly, understood my career ambitions and helped me work towards things that I wanted to achieve during my time at the company.

Everyone on the internship at Ernst and Young is given a counsellor, who is there to help support you and will eventually be the one deciding whether or not you get the graduate offer. You also get a ‘buddy’ who is on the graduate programme and is a more informal point of contact. The teams also provide lots of support.

On a daily basis I had extensive client work to complete within ITRA (my service line) and the work I was doing was at the same level as current first year graduates. This meant I was quite busy learning and completing the tasks assigned to meet expected quality for the clients.

I was given as much responsibility as would be expected for an intern at a professional services firm. It is difficult to take ownership of client interactions with limited experience, however I had great exposure to clients and felt like I was contributing greatly to my engagement, helping the team meet deadlines.

Interacting with the client will prove useful over the course of my future career. Assurance isn’t related to my degree of mechanical engineering, hence only being rated a 7. Gaining professional experience in one of the biggest accounting and professional services firms will no doubt prove useful when it comes to producing quality work.

The grads on my floor were in general very fun, even in the office while maintaining a professional outlook. There were also a few socials planned for us, although these were few and far between. My team had a social as well as a leaving lunch for me at Nando’s.

There was a lot of organisation on the internship at Ernst and Young. We were given an experience map which gave suggestions on what we should look to do whilst on the internship here. There was also a Corporate Social Responsibility day arranged, as well as fundraising for EY’s charity the EY foundation.

The firm and its team members spent a good amount of time explaining things to me within my service line which proved very useful. The training at the beginning lasted 2 days, and gave an insight to the company, it’s culture, how to behave around clients, and best advice on working in the office.

Future prospects are looking good; a grad job at Ernst & Young is an excellent place to start your career. The only reason it’s not a 10 is because I’m not 100% in love with the service line I would be joining, but it’s still an excellent opportunity and I will take the offer should it come.

I found a good group of friends within my sub service line, and will be seeing them after the internship is done. Socials with more senior colleagues were also enjoyable, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time during the day socialising and networking throughout the company. There were also socials arranged at my office with interns.

Very expensive.

Pretty good I’d imagine.

There wasn’t really enough time as I was busy enough with the work I was given.