• Name: Aly Jamal
• University: UCL
• Course: BA (Hons) Russian and German
• Placement / Internship Position/Job Title: Summer Intern – Corporate Tax

What was the application process like?

“The process consisted of four stages, testing a wide range of skills from numerical aptitude to business awareness. It was challenging but definitely gave me opportunity to provide evidence of when I have demonstrated the firm’s values. The interview also provided me with a great chance to ask questions about the firm and the role of an intern in that department.”

What did you do on a daily basis?

“The work I was doing was at the same level as a first year trainee with the firm. I worked on tax returns and computations, wrote e-mails to clients, liaised with HMRC and attended several client meeting. This was a great chance to learn how partners and senior managers communicate with current and prospective clients. The main highlight for me though was taking part in a corporate responsibility event. It was a fantastic opportunity to give something back to the local community.”

What did you learn on your placement / Internship?

“I learnt more about the firm’s service lines, its structure and its working culture. More specifically, having been involved in several tasks over the six weeks, I learnt the importance of prioritising tasks and meeting deadlines. Overall I feel that the internship has provided me with key skills that are vital for success in the financial world.”

Any top tips for a student interested in a placement / internship here?

“Get involved in as many things as possible! Six weeks goes really quickly. Take as much from your time in the office as possible, but also make the most of social activities. A night out with all the other interns at the Comedy Store was a particular highlight.”

To find out more about Grant Thornton and the internship opportunities, click on the button below:

Apply now!

Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Karla and Anna have been getting on at TUI!

“Hi! We are two of the ten new placement students at TUI UK and we will be sharing our experiences of our time here through regular blogs. I, Karla am studying Tourism Management at Bournemouth University and will be working in Accommodation Only, which is part of the Early Trading Team. Anna is studying International Business at Loughborough University and has a product role in the cruise department.

As a brief overview, in the trading department we analyse sales and react with pricing decisions depending on the current state of the economy. It is really is more interesting than it sounds!!! Product on the other hand is more to do with planning, co-ordinating brochure content and unit selection.

We started the placement with a three-week induction which gave us an intense overview of the company and its values and vision. For example, we had various presentations from numerous departments within Head Office such as Marketing, Finance and HR. This gave us an insight into how the different departments interlink and allowed us to meet key individuals within the company.

As part of the induction we were given training sessions that would develop our skills needed for the year ahead. We learnt about internal systems that we will be using in our job roles and we also had a useful session on how to use Excel – which jogged a few people’s memories! Each placement student was assigned time with their teams to get to know team members and more about their individual jobs.  The current placements were also with us over this period so they could share their knowledge and help us to settle in.

One area of the induction that we all really enjoyed was a mystery shop to the Thomson, First Choice and competitors travel agencies. Aside from all the giggles, we managed to gain some valuable information that we reported to the Customer Service Manager.

One thing that we have all discovered is that the commercial team isn’t afraid to socialise! Since starting, we have not been short of invites for all kinds of events such as: meals out at lunch, rounders tournaments, picnics in the park and team nights out.

One night that stands out, for those that can remember, was the night in London to say goodbye to the old placement students. An area was booked for us in Sway bar. It was a fantastic night and it was really nice to socialise with our team outside of the office.

Since the induction we have all been settling into our roles and familiarising ourselves with daily tasks. We have regular one to one meetings with our managers to discuss our progress and set objectives. A recent meeting we have all attended is the quarterly commercial update; it gave us an overview of the performance of the division and snapshots of future plans.

So far, everyone is having a great time and we will keep you updated on what we get up to throughout the year!”

Find out more from Karla and Anna, as well as our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how David has been getting on!

“Yo! I’m David from Queens University Belfast. With a compulsory placement year as part of my course (Computing and IT) I have secured a year placement with the Computer Sciences Corporation.

Shall I be honest? I was so bored of computer systems and programming, and didn’t have too much interest in it’s career path. So I put my head down (and to somewhat strange reactions from the HR departments) I made my applications for Business placements. Not being too interested in staying at home for the year, I looked further afield to England, Scotland and ROI for the true opportunities.

To say the placement search has been beneficial to me in the long run of my forthcoming career would be an understatement. Running around in September of last year I was absolutely clueless about the process and what lay before me. My first interview, an assessment day with MS was woeful. Having hilariously turned up 2 hours late and causing one of the poor HR staff to come in on a snow day, in ‘casual’ dress I fumbled upon the numerical test and barely answered more than 40% of the questions. I swear I was passed to 2nd round out of sympathy alone!

Cut to now and I have the interview process down! I am now with a business that I felt was genuinely right for me and would make the most of what I could offer. With other offers on the table, it was RMP that referred me to CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation). Their professionalism during the interview stages and potential opportunities they offered were unrivaled. Also the fact they have an office in the Gherkin and didn’t ask too many questions about my Belfast travel expenses was maybe part of the decision process too!

Now I am awaiting my late start {Due to the nature of the job I was sent through a rigorous vetting procedure} on 1st September. It’s been the longest summer ever but it means I won’t get time off next year! I’m expecting to be up to my eyeballs in work that I won’t need a holiday… haha we will see!

I’ll be updating this closely alongside my UNI report for the year, So don’t be a stranger and make sure to comment ”

Find out more from David and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Sarah has been getting on!

“My name is Sarah. I’m 21 years old and I have recently begun working at GlaxoSmithKline. I say recently but it has been 12 weeks already and it has gone so fast!!! I can’t quite believe I am nearly a quarter of the way through my year!! I can’t believe it was a year ago I was just starting to think about applying for placements and now I am fully immersed in the world of full time employment.

I have absolutely loved my two years at University and so I was torn as to whether or not I wanted to leave it for a year. However, the advantages of having a year in industry on your CV far outweighed any nostalgic concerns I had about taking a year out.

I began applying in October and GSK was one of the first companies I applied to. I really liked their values and what they stood for as an organisation. After completing an online application form I was progressed through to take part in a Telephone Interview and eventually asked to attend an Assessment Centre.

After the initial excitement of securing the placement, I began to get nervous about what the year had install for me and what my role would be like. Working in a large organisation is unlike anything I have ever done before and so it was a daunting prospect. My main concern was managing my own role and ensuring I did/ do well in it.

My first day was on the 28th June, and within only a few minutes in my office I felt welcomed and much more assured that this experience was something to look forward to as opposed to worry about. My office is open plan, and is one of the many offices in GSK House which operates a “hot desking” system. This means that you have locker and personal lap top and sit somewhere different, next to someone different, within a given space, every day. This helps enhance the open and friendly culture already evident within the organisation.

I am working with the Learning and Development Centre of Excellence for the organisation. This enables be exposure to GSK’s approach on both talent management and strategic resourcing. As well I am responsible for the recruitment of Industrial Placement students, to work within the Global Manufacturing and Supply business unit.

Alongside managing the Industrial Placement scheme I support the Graduate programme. Being so involved in the recruitment of Industrial Placement students and Graduates is very interesting as it is so relevant to me personally. One aspect of my role is facilitating Assessment Centres for both Graduates and Industrial Placements. Within my first month of working at GSK I found myself presented with the challenge of running and organising a Graduate Assessment Centre. This was quite a scary experience at first, as it was only 6 months ago I had been attending one myself. I really enjoyed the experience though; having such responsibility so early one enabled me to feel I could make the role my own from an early stage. The day went well and we were able to fill the 2 positions.

Alongside this work I have also been involved in international discussions to set up Graduate schemes in China and India. One element of this I have particularly enjoyed is learning about how different cultures dictate business activity and behaviour during negotiations.

I have also been involved in some of the marketing of recruitment opportunities and have been asked to carry out a talent review for Graduates at the organisation. Both of these projects are great exposure to different elements of organisational work. With Universities going back later this month, I envisage having a very busy couple of months during the recruitment season! I’m really looking forward to it.”

Find out more from Sarah and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Ben has been getting on!

“It’s about time for my second blog, so here we go.

8 weeks into my placement and I’m starting to realise I have made the right choice. The four weeks I’ve now had working alone (without the previous intern training me) have shifted into a new gear, gradually increasing in workload, responsibility and dare I say stress. But as I keep telling friends and family, it’s a “good” level of stress.

The pace has definitely picked up since my last blog, I have taken on multiple research projects which people have asked me conduct, allowing me to demonstrate some of the techniques I have learnt over the past two years. More importantly I have been learning techniques used in financial analysis which I have not come across before. This has provided me with exposure to an area of banking and finance which I am really beginning to enjoy. I am confident the work I’m doing now will help determine the modules I will take in my final year of university: to focus more on finance and econometrics, rather than economic theory say.

I have also been involved in the development and improvement of a new website which the department is intending to roll-out soon. Being asked to think like a client who is using the website has been a useful experience as I constructively scrutinise aspects which could be improved. Since all of the department’s research is published, having a website which is user friendly and efficient is imperative.

When I say I feel I have made the right choice, this not only refers to choosing State Street, who, to give credit, are a tremendously integrated business. The employees are more than willing to help you, and the consensus from the cohort of interns is that even after 8 weeks they felt like a part of the business. My other reference ties into how everyone who I speak to is telling me how invaluable a placement year in industry is. Every week someone else tells me how they wish they had followed a similar path or how much they would value, as an employer, a candidate for a job who has applied skills from experience in the workplace. This reassures me that taking a year out in industry is one of the best decisions I have made, and I recommend this option to anyone considering it. If a year is not possible at your university, a summer internship will provide you with an invaluable insight whilst demonstrating to employers that you are keen and motivated to work in a particular industry. Even if all you learn is that you’re not suited to that particular business or industry, you will come away with insight and experience,; two of the most valuable assets as a graduate.”

Find out more from Ben and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!

Hello I’m Samantha and I’m from Aston University where I’m studying combined honors in Business and Psychology. It has been good at university learning all the theory but the main thing I have been looking forward to is my placement year where I can get some real experience. I’m lucky enough that Microsoft have given me the opportunity to spend that year with them!

The first week was an induction week where all the different departments within Microsoft gave presentations and explained what they did. Half way through the week we had an outdoors day, where luckily the sun kept shining! This involved playing human table football, inflatable volleyball and building catapults! Then the week was finished off with an end of year “All hands” meeting. Where Gordon Frazer told us how well the UK had done – so well we were position front and center at the yearly MGX meeting in America. Also my department was given a special award for being sub of the year! So that made me very excited to be working with them! Then it was back out into the lovely sunshine for a BBQ by the lake.

Following week was straight down to proper work. I was introduced to my department – Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) and my team, the audience marketing group. There are three audiences – developer, academic and IT Pro. I work with one other person for the IT Pro audience. This means that straight away I was told I would be doing the job of a full-time employee (FTE) as there were only two of us there was lots of work to be done.

I got straight into the deep end and was given a campaign to run. I am heading up the optimised desktop campaign which is Microsoft’s vision for making people productive anywhere, managing risks through enhanced security and control as well as reducing cost through streamlining PC management. This is capable through having Windows 7 enterprise, IE8, Office 2010, MDOP and the concept of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). As you can probably guess by now there is a huge amount of acronyms used here and just learning those was a serious hurdle. Though now I do have to remind myself not to use them when talking to someone outside Microsoft! The second obstacle was all the technological knowledge. I spent the first week reading up on the technology to understand how it all worked. With my audience being IT pro’s I realized I would never know as much as them, but I was determined to know enough to at least be able to hold up a conversation with them!

Once I had got my head round that I got stuck into the campaign. This involved planning out all the high level messaging that I wanted to be saying and then drilling down to the specific that I wanted to be saying throughout the months. Due to budget restrictions most of the marketing is done digitally – as I found I would get to know our TechNet website very well! I am now in the process of waiting to heard back from the agency I briefed to see what ideas they have come up with for a landing page to clearly get our message of the optimised desktop out to the over 1 million IT Pro’s!

I also get to work closely with our evangelists who know everything there is to know about the technology and go out and speak to the audiences. They are great to have a chat with to find out what the audience is thinking and what they want. They are always putting together fun videos and pod casts to teach the audience how to use and deploy the new technologies. Together with them I am going to create an event where they run a series of live meetings which all get put onto a website. Then there will be questions asked with prizes given out to the IT Pro that blogs back the fastest correct answer. This is an idea to create something fun for IT Pro’s to get them involved in our technology.

Last year was a big launch year for Microsoft with W7 coming out. Having seen the adverts on the TV, I wanted to get involved with a launch this year. I got a place on the Office communicator v-team and was giving the responsibly of owning the IT Pro readiness plan. Therefore I will be running several events for IT Pro’s to come to where the new launch will be demonstrated so they can get a real understanding of the steps forward taken with this launch. Luckily as part of the team I am already running the new software and it’s so good, I’m really excited about our audience seeing it!

As well as my day to day job in the office Microsoft gives me a lot of opportunity to take on stretch projects. One I took on fairly early was to be the leader of the Millennials v-team. For those that haven’t heard of the term millennials before they are the generation that were born from 1980-2000. Hence they have grown up with technology all around them enabling them to be digitally native. The workforce culture and environment is changing and they are driving this change. So I wanted the opportunity to lead the team and educate others on what the workplace of the future will be like.

All this sounded very daunting when I started but due to the great network of support it soon became not so daunting! When I first got there I was set up to have weekly 1-on-1 meeting with Phil who has been in the company for over 18 years and knows everything about the IT Pro audience. They told us at the beginning that everyone in the company would be very happy to meet us for a quick cup of coffee if we had any questions. I at first didn’t fully believe this, but I can say now – full of many cups of coffee that it it’s true. People from all over the company are happy to spend time 1-on-1 to help me develop a network of contacts so that I always have someone to ask for help when I need it.

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Ben has been getting on!

“I am currently 3 weeks into my placement with State Street and am here writing my first blog. The question on everyone’s lips for me is: so how is it going? To them, I am reserved. It hasn’t started as quickly as I anticipated, and maybe that’s a fault of my own for being a very eager person. But inside I really feel like this is the first stepping stone into a long and successful career, which I cannot wait to progress along. The other question is: how was your first day? This, as I’m sure most people will say was incredibly exciting but at the same time I did struggle to remember that I was only an intern and nothing was expected of me yet. This is something I would recommend to people moving into a placement: yes it will be scary but you’re a new employee and expected to know nothing, this was how I felt!

The people at State Street have entirely made the placement what it is so far, very friendly and approachable, whilst professional at their desk. For me, the people were always going to be the most important part of my internship, and I am lucky that it is one of the finer qualities of State Street. I assume this aspect is to credit for their terrific client reputation and success as a custodial bank. Moreover, the transition period over which I am shadowing the current intern is paying off, and I have a lot to owe Neill for being a very good teacher. This time next week, Neill will have left and the responsibility will be on my shoulders, I am nearly ready to take over.

My job title exists as Global Research Intern and I am responsible for a few specifics. On a daily basis I will send out research publications which I will update from our raw data sources and send out to clients who have been in contact with the sales team and benefit from our research. These are often a few pages worth of charts which update the client about what is happening in their chosen markets or global regions for example. The work is heavily based on Excel, which up until now I thought I was mildly competent at, however I had only ever saw the tip of the iceberg! The learning of this program happens very quickly as I am using it all day. Aside from this, I will be conducting ad-hoc prices of research for my manager over the coming year. I have already finished my first which will aid the induction of a new employee due to start in 2 weeks time, this was a really satisfying exercise.

One of the other qualities of an internship is that there are other students in the same boat as you, so being encouraged to meet up with them for drinks at the end of each week was a godsend. You feel like an outsider when in a new company and the average age of an employee is 30+, however an evening with the interns will remind you what it feels like to be in the union bar! I encourage all interns to meet up with other interns at the institution they are placed at; it will improve the experience tenfold.

On the whole, my placement has started great! Working on Canary Wharf is a dream; teamed with the company’s credentials, I am very happy! I do come home tired and eager to relax, but each evening I cannot wait to get back into the city, this is enough to tell me that it’s going well!”

Find out more from Ben and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers so read on to find out how Anna has been getting on!

“My first few weeks at GSK have gone by so quickly and I think the best thing about it is how varied my job has been so far and how friendly and welcoming everyone is!

I have now been here 10 weeks and done so many different things! At first it was strange getting into the role as I don’t have a manager who delegates jobs for me to do every day and takes a more proactive approach. Initially I was worried I wouldn’t know what to do with myself each day but I have never once felt like that since coming to work and have found that by ensuring I am always busy I have in fact ended up with so many different things to be getting on with.

I found it a lot easier to get in to the role than I thought as I had an official one week handover but the student I was taking over from was still in the same office for 3 weeks after this helping me with anything I needed. This period was really helpful and prepared me as best as possible to begin the job properly.

One of my first important tasks was to write a global news story for the GSK intranet website. This story is posted to employees all over the world (i.e. 100,000 people.) Although this was only internal I was quite nervous about the amount of people that would read it, especially senior management from my department. However, I ensured that I got as much feedback as possible before sending the final copy and so was happy with the final piece.

I have been working a lot on a project to design interactive maps for our website. The Maps will explain all of the programmes my team (Global Community Partnerships) supports and so I am going through the process of researching everything and speaking to managers to find out what they would like to see included on the map. I am really enjoying this project as it is really helping me to develop my knowledge regarding the work my team does. I also feel I have been given a lot of responsibility on it which can be nerve-wracking but also really empowering.

My other main project is updating our internal website as the whole company has just converted to a new intranet system and so everything needs updating. This is not only challenging my literacy and marketing skills but also developing my IT skills.

Alongside these main projects I have been doing smaller scale jobs such as emailing people to organise Orange Days (Days where employees volunteer for charities.) I have also been emailing people to organise Macmillan coffee morning within GSK. Finally, quite a key part of my job has involved attending events run by our partners. For example, the opening of the ‘Who Am I exhibition’ at the Science Museum as GSK funded this. Also the opening for the Summer exhibition at the Royal Academy as we are corporate members and attending an exhibition at the Strand Gallery with the National Down syndrome Association. All of these events have been really enjoyable and also something complete new as they involve a lot of networking with senior people from all sorts of organizations.”

Find out more from Anna and our other Guest Bloggers in the next couple of weeks!