Guest Blog

I would like to present myself. My name is Laure, I am a French university student studying at the university of Lyon in France. I am studying Banking, Finance, Management and Economics and I am doing an internship at Capgemini Consulting in UK.

I am writing this article in order to share my experiences at Capgemini Consulting as a French intern.

This is the first time I have done an internship, let alone one abroad.

I am a university student and at the end of this academic year we were required to do an internship abroad. The goal of this was for us to practice and improve our English.

But why choose Capgemini Consulting?

Firstly because, in pursuing my studies and my life, I have decided I would like to consult and audit. Secondly, Capgemini Consulting is one of the biggest consulting companies and it is very famous (well known).  I could not miss the opportunity to spend several weeks working in this firm.

I will try to tell you my experience through the four main goals that I set myself for my time here: observe, listen and understand, practice and progress.

• Observe: As I have an ambition to do this type of work in the future, I had to try to understand what type of work people do here. But this is not always an easy task and even less so for a foreigner as much of the work is out of the office working with clients.

•  Listen and understand: this task is particularly difficult to achieve when it has to be done in a language that is not my own.  It takes a lot of concentration. The first few days and the first meetings were really difficult. Indeed, it takes a lot of concentration to stay focused when you do not understand much of what is being said, which is not very easy. So there I had to force myself a bit at first. I am not saying that I understand everything now, far from it, I think I am beginning to gain a little more concentration, which allows me to follow a meeting or conversation for longer. At the beginning, listening to a phone conversation was also very hard for me, but I think it is good for the ear.

• Apply: After observing, listening and trying to understand, I had to put this into practice right from the first day. During my first day I had to summarize and collect information from a number of CVs. The most complicated part of this was to summarize the pages. Initially, I had to ask some help. I confess that when this first day was finished, it was a little confused because it was all still new to me. But after more than two weeks behind the desk, everything seems clearer, almost simple.

• Progress: This is not something that is done in a snap of the fingers, it takes time and a lot of practice. As for my English, I think being integrated for six weeks in a company in England will do nothing but benefit me.  I probably improve a little every day even if I do not give any account.  Since the first week, I have been working with someone else.  At first, I asked for a lot of help, or had to repeat myself several times. Now, after three weeks spent in the company, I can get better by myself. It is true that from time to time, I ask for help or that I repeat myself but I feel that it is less often than before. As a result, they have to seen or felt that I am more at ease and suddenly I have been given more and more things to do. For example, I have been charged with translating articles from a blog which will then be posted online.

In my time here, I had an especially big project. Indeed, there were two of us working on the project. We were required to set up a PowerPoint on banking and insurance in the USA. I did not think that this project would take much time but in fact we spent two weeks to the day on it. The first task I had was to find a map of New York, find the addresses of each company and place them on a map. This was the shortest thing to do, that is to say, it took me one or two days. Then came the heaviest work, the part that took the longest: find all sorts of information on these banks and insurance companies. This research for information took both of us to complete it faster. For this project, it was not me who took care to do PowerPoint, but I could see, it took a lot of time. When it was finished, I was asked to check if everything looked good and was perfectly aligned etc. I enjoyed participating in this project because I like the subject. Indeed, it follows on from what I have learned in University.

Finally, I am happy to do my internship in this company. This allows me to see what kind of tasks are done in a consulting firm. Before I knew that I would do my internship here, I had thought to specialize during my years of study, in audit and management control. These weeks at Capgemini Consulting have helped me to confirm my choice.

I would like to say a special thanks to the FS team. Thanks for welcoming me like this in the team, for all your help and for your patience when you had to explain something to me.