Actuarial Intern Review

I really enjoyed my placement here. The team were supportive and encouraging and wanted you to succeed. There is a great working environment (even when working remotely from home) and the team and senior staff are always happy to reach out to you, or for you to reach out to them which made me feel like part of a team even while working from home. The opportunities provided were brilliant with learning, client work and 1-1 opportunites.

I felt very valued by my colleagues. They provide you with a lot of client work and a lot of support on the client work. Colleagues are quick to provide feedback and will support you on work when it's a difficult task or provide encouragement when you've done good work. Constructive feedback is also commonly given and allows you to learn from your mistakes quickly to ensure that you can complete tasks well and really makes you feel like the team want the best for you.

My managers were very patient and supportive and gave great advice. We are provided with a buddy, intern managers and general internship oversight managers. The buddy is essential while you are there and they are your first point of contact to answer any questions or issues you may have, even down to basic ones like timesheet management. The intern managers are very supportive and help guide you through the internship with objective setting and client work setting to allow you to fully engage with the internship.

The first few weeks are very busy with lots of training and introductory material to the day-to-day life of an actuary. They provide you with many training sessions to get to grips with basic calculations and standard work that you'll be doing throughout the internship. After that there is always client work to be doing. The team are actively looking to get you involved with client work and want to challenge you so you are busy with work set from different people all the time.

I was given lots of responsibility during my placement. The team expects you to be able to complete tasks (with support and guidance obviously) and expects you to get on with work that a normal graduate would undertake. This allows you to get a feel for what they would do normally and really makes you responsible for the quality of your work and your time management to ensure that deadlines are met and work is of a good standard.

The training I received was fairly specific to the actuarial business but will stand me in good stead in the future. One of the most important parts of the training that will be applicable no matter what was the presentation training. This gave us hints and tips to allow us to better present to the other interns at the end of the internship and will be something that I use in many other situations in the future.

Working from home doesn't allow you to experience the normal office atmosphere but the teams do their best to replicate this. They invited us to meetings to discuss work for the week and people were always calling for a chat which allowed us to get a good idea of the feel of the office. Despite everyone being busy there was a good feel around the office with everyone being open to conversation or questions if you needed something and people being very supportive of others.

The internship was very well structured with a plan from day 1. The first two weeks were very learning heavy but were organised well to allow us to take in the information and have time to understand it. There was always something to be doing and an event organised for us to be involved in. The teams also provided lots of client work to get involved in which allowed us to learn a lot on the job.

There was a lot of investment in training and that seems to be consistent throughout your time at WTW. The first two weeks were non stop training, using self study materials to learn the fundamentals and having virtual classroom sessions to teach us the calculations we may have to do throughout our internship. Also they provided recap sessions at the start of every week to allow us to go over material we'd studied the week before which were really good and make you feel very supported.

I would love to return to WTW to work there after this internship. It has been a great eye opener to the culture there and they have been so supportive that I would enjoy it thoroughly. Grad jobs seem to be well supported with budgets for training and study days afforded to you which means studying for exams is easier. Also, the company seems to value contributions from all colleagues which makes working there even better as you will be very well valued.

It's hard to get a good social scene from home but the team tried to provide social events and ran an intern social on the last day to get us all involved. It sounds like a good social scene when everyone is in the office and working properly so I'd like to experience that!

I lived at home due to it being a remote internship so there were no costs. Bristol is a fairly expensive city but less so than London so it would've normally been fine.

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Provision of activities outside of work was hard due to working remotely due to COVID but there were opportunities for socials outside of work but I imagine they would be better if we were in the office.