Agne Rimkute

Country of origin: United Kingdom

Placement: EY

I chose to take a placement year in order to be able to try out a potential career as well as to take a break from studying. I also believe that a placement year strengthens the degree as the experience provides practical knowledge and insights for the last year of University and shows that a student is able to apply their studies to real life work.

I had the role of a 1st year consultant in the performance improvement advisory division at EY. This involved joining various teams within advisory on a number of different client projects as well as internal business development and sales projects.

The day to day work was very diverse. Some days I was doing excel analysis for a client - for example if two companies were thinking of merging into one. Other days I was scheduling and attending client interviews with executives from large organisations in order to understand the issues their organisations were facing. Some roles involved using software like Microsoft Visio to draft process charts, other roles involved purely making PowerPoint slides summarising our findings in a project.

I am definitely very happy that I chose to do a placement as it means that I now have 1 year of consulting experience and training from a well-respected and global company. I have learnt vast amounts about different industries, business topics and about consulting in general. To add to this, I have met some amazing people and significantly expanded my network.

Living in London was definitely the highlight of my experience as having job was a very different lifestyle from being a student. In terms of the placement itself, I enjoyed the diverse number of projects that I had the opportunity to work in. Most of my peers were doing a 9-5 job in the office, doing the same thing every day, whereas I was on completely different consulting projects all the time.

After graduation, my plan is to move abroad and to work on a management role as we call it in consulting terms ‘in the industry’. Perhaps in the future I would come back to consulting, but this is not something I want to pursue further right now. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to experience consulting as this is such an interesting career. Not many people understand what happens in this job unless they actually experience it on a first-hand basis.

LUMS did a specific module in order to prepare us for the placement. This involved sessions on interviews, CVs, psychometric testing etc. That was beneficial. Also, we had regular CV workshops, where the LUMS team checked our CVs and provided advice on how to improve them.