First Week of New Classes and Internship

During the second half of the semester I have one class and an internship. My class is on Mondays from 1-5 and I work my internship Tuesday through Friday.

My class on Mondays is a Shakespeare class which I really like. The teacher is very passionate about Shakespeare and very theatrical in class. We are reading Henry IV right now, which I personally find boring but the teacher makes it more exciting. My roommate Carly is in my class which is awesome, because she is an English minor and has read a lot of Shakespeare. She helps me when I can’t follow what is going on .

My KPMG internship which is for credit started this week as well. The office I work at is located at One Canada Square which is the tallest building in London. KPMG’s offices are located on the 39th floor and needless to say, we have AMAZING views of London. I definitely want to take some pictures before my internship is over. My commute over to Canary Warf is about one hour and my hours are 9:30 to 5:30 so I leave around 8:15 just to be safe.

There are 4 or 5 BU KPMG interns, but one of them, Masha, works with me on the same project. She even sits right next to me so we can keep each other company.

Within KPMG I work in their financial assurance arm and on the government consulting project, “World Class Skills Project”. World Class Skills is a program funded by the government after the publication of the Leitch report which basically said that too many people in England are lacking high levels of education and that British universities are not teaching the skills desired by employers. The program sets up hundreds of “events” a year that are like seminars to help universities and people improve.

The first day, Wednesday, February 25, Masha and I arrived and immediately received our desks and laptops. Neil, gave us an introductory talk about the project and also orientation materials. However, after we after looking through all the intro materials things really slowed down. We eventually helped a man named Jim with documentation for invoices but that only took about an hour. However, we were not discouraged because our supervisor, Liz, let us walk around for a bit (there is a mall in the basement of our building!!!!) and apologized that there wasn’t more to do, but promised there would be soon.

The second day, Thursday, February 26, seemed slow at first too, until Jim eventually gave us more administrative paper work to do. Then, Liz invited us to shadow her in a meeting about costing for the project which was extremely interesting and I can't really say much about :-x.

Friday, February 27 was much busier. A monthly reporting cycle for the project was about to close on Monday and a lot needed to be done. Every month KPMG gives the government a report about the project and its achievements.

In the morning I shadowed Andrew from Data Reporting and we scrubbed data for the report together. We made sure that different documents aligned with each other and the website.

Part of the monthly report is a kind of “customer satisfaction” section in which the results of feedback from the events attendees are summarized. In the afternoon, Masha and I were taught how to enter the data from the feedback. This is a huge task because the feedback is on paper and must be manually entered into the system. I guess EVERYONE on the project helps enter this data during the monthly cycle closing because there are just hundreds of feedback forms to enter every month. That kept us busy for most of the afternoon.

Overall, I really like my internship at KPMG. Everyone is very nice and usually we are invited to eat with someone for lunch. Lunch is awesome because they give us an allowance of almost 3 pounds a day to use at their cafeteria or “canteen” as they call it. While they may not sound like a lot, it can basically buy medium sized sand which and a soda. It is also really good to be with Masha because we can help each other and keep each other company when work is slow for us.