Penultimate Year Summer Intern Review

I have genuinely enjoyed my placement this year, I feel I have had a good balance of work with my team and interaction with my peers on the internship via our charity project.

My colleagues made me feel like my contribution to to the team was genuinely useful and helped reduce their workload.

I had a one to one every week with my manager which allowed me to address any problems or questions I may have had.

Once I was up and running on all the systems and had begun my project, I didn't feel like I needed to find ways to fill the day, and neither did I feel like I needed to stay late to complete my work on many days.

The project that I have worked on will be implemented in the network next few months, and I just "got on with it" rather than being micro-managed by my manager.

I feel that the organisational skills and personal communications skills I learn were not perhaps especially useful for my degree, but will certainly be useful for the positions of responsibility I hold at University, and will be useful in the workplace.

Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, but due to the nature of the work that the team does (very fast-paced with shifting priorities) the office is often fairly focused as people knuckle down.

On my first day in the office, all my system privileges but one were in place and my laptop and pass were ready for collection - extremely efficient! However, the charity project was not so well organised: we were only notified of our teams one week before which meant the planning we could do was limited. The locations we were sent to sometimes did not correspond geographically with where we were placed and lived.

We had a comprehensive induction, underwent e-learning, and my line manager made sure that we identified key areas of personal development and addressed them by undertaking certain tasks and going out into the network from HQ to experience different areas of the business.

I hope to attain a place on their ET graduate scheme.

Many of the interns, unlike last year, did not seem to have an interest in socialising and building a network, this is perhaps because we are spending only two days all together, unlike the previous year in which there was a community day for all the interns halfway through. However, amongst those interested in socialising, there was a good scene.

I was placed in London, which is more expensive than the rest of the country.

I was placed in Canary Wharf, which has a large variety of places to go after work to socialise, and London itself is obviously full of places to go out.

There were a few networking opportunitues and charity events to join, all baed in London.