Today is the end of my first week of internship at EY! Haha. It is a happy ending: I managed to finish my work, got 1st for my group's presentation and went off at 5pm. YES! This would probably be the one and only time when I end work at 5pm. lol.

Alright, here is my reflection for my first week of work:

On the first day, it was basically just a day of training, with the last hour spent introducing me to the colleagues at my department. In my dept, there is only one other intern who came in with me, Jack, who is also from NTU ACC (group B). But even though we are from the same school, I have never met him before. Haha. Somehow, the two of us get along really well and I really think of him as a bro. Currently, we lunch with the rest of the temps on the same floor and they think it is really funny that we tend to complete each other's sentences. lol. I don't really think we do that, but whatever~ Our lunch group is one that is really funny and basically the lunch break is the highlight of each day.

The work team that I have been attached to is really nice too. On my 3rd day of work, I was assigned my first piece of work, where I had to draft a tax return. My god, the system that they use is really complicated. One of the associates taught me personally and I was completely overwhelmed. The time they take to teach me how to do one task is probably double of the time they would have taken if they had done the work themselves. So I am really very grateful that they all take the extra time and effort to teach me. For that first piece of tax return, I accidentally pressed something in the system which generated an email out to all the big shots in the department and I was totally "oh shit". Seriously. My face went pale green and I felt sick. It was only my 3rd day leh! omg. Then I went to the associate who gave me the task and he said "small issues. no worries. I will take care of it" Wah, I tell you, I was so grateful I would have kissed his shoes. It feel so bad to have someone else clean up my mess. Sigh. On the bright side, I made the error early in the internship, so people can still accept it. Compared to when I was at DBS, they only realised my major error when I was about to leave after 6months and my guess is that they probably were thinking "what has this girl been doing all these months..." lol.

The first tax return job I did was actually pretty simplified already but it still took me like 5hours to finish it. lol. For the second tax return, I was actually asked to draft it from scratch. That took me around 7 hours. But from that, I really learned how the entire thing works. Phew. Mind-blowing task. Everyday I get home, I am totally drained mentally and physically. Physically 'cause the handbag I carry to work has to be hand-carried and it is pretty heavy, so it is like arm-training. And mentally 'cause it is quite tiring to change from being a student to being an employee. From having a 3-day study week, I now have to do a 5-day full day work week. In this week, my face usually goes zoned out by 4 or 5pm. Haha.

There is this temp girl who has been here for 8 months already and she was the one who taught us the stuff Jack and I needed to know. 2 years ago, I was in her position, teaching other interns how to do my job at DBS too. Ahh, those were the good times. It is so much easier to be the teacher than the student. lol. The first time you learn everything you have to use a lot a lot of brain cells. Learning the stuff as someone teaches you is one thing but doing it yourself is another. There were so many problems I met on my 2nd task that I felt bad for troubling her and the team members so much.

Besides drafting tax returns, I also took on the task of calling IRAS for confirmation of some clients' details. I think I have a nice girly phone voice ba. Haha. So far, no one has given me any trouble over the stuff that I have asked for even when I am not officially allowed to ask for those info. Another thing I realised is that at work, interpersonal skills are really important. lol. For phone calls, you need to know how to negotiate to get the info that you want. In the team, you need to get along well with the rest of the members. Yea, yesterday, one of the members helped me to take a night snack and placed it on my table while I went to the toilet. So sweet of her! And that reminds me...for those 2 returns that I have drafted, I haven't asked the task-givers whether I did them alright. I mean, by right, I should be taking the initiative to follow up luh so that I can learn from my mistakes and not do it again for my next tax return.

Overall, the people here are so nice that I can't wait to make my éclairs for them as thank you! I think I will write small notes and stick to a box of 3 éclairs. 比较有心. Haha. Wondering if I should make something else in the meantime before this final one though. Maybe cheesecake or something. Hmm, see how.

During the training on the first day, they split all the interns into groups and each group had to make a video and present about it today. My group only met up once and I was actually late for it. I only attended 30min of it then we pang gang already. lol. My name wasn't even in the video. I think the leader forgot my name. Oh well. It's a good thing that my face can't really be seen in the video 'cause it is supposed to go up on facebook. Eek. I prefer to keep a low profile. The leader was the one who put together the entire video, poor guy. Our group's mentality is that we don't need to be the first. We just don't want to be the last. Haha. Turned out that we were the first! When the emcee announced our group's turn to present, everyone were laughing that our name wasn't very creative. We called ourselves The Intern and made a word out of each syllable of INTERN to put into the video. Haha. I wonder how we won though. After one of the partners explained the theme in greater detail at the end, I actually thought that we were out of point. Oh well~ We were all quite surprised that our group won. Haha.

I also realised that everyone in the dept are really smart, even the temps. Most of them are not even uni students, just Alevel grads waiting to go to uni and after temping here, their tax knowledge is probably even better than mine. Till now, I am still half blur about what is taxable and what is not deductible but they already know everything by heart. Wow. All of them also work till really late, like 10pm. I was shocked when I heard that. I mean, temps don't have a supervisor assessing their performance, so why work so hard? I mean, the OT pay is good, of course, but still. No work-life balance leh. There are 3 temp guys who are the same age as me and the other 5 temp girls are 2 years younger. One of the guys is really handsome ehh. SJI-kind of handsome. Hee. Too bad, people probably got gf already. My luck in this area has never been good. Sigh.

My work persona seems to be really attractive. People are willing to listen to me speak, unlike in school, where I can't even make people laugh and pay attention to what I say. Over here, the temp guys will specially seek me out to talk to me and the temp girls will initiate conversations with me during lunch too. They actually seem to think that Jack and I will be together, 'cause we seem to get along so well. Haha. Neither of us have said it is not possible between the two of us though. For me, it is because I just don't want to make things awkward between Jack and me. I hope that for Jack, it is for the same reason as well and not because he thinks there is a chance between us. Ew. No. Thanks.

I guess that's all I have to say for my 1st week~ Hopefully things will get better next week. For my 2 precious weekends, I am just gonna slack slack and slack!