I spent much of my free time walking around London and experiencing the lifestyle.

Author: Megan Leach | Major: Computer Science | Semester: Summer 2023

London, England is one of those places that is generally on everyone’s travel bucket list. From the iconic internationally known landmarks to the extensive royal history, London truly has something of interest to offer to anyone. When the opportunity of interning there for eight weeks fell into my lap, I immediately jumped on it. Now I look back on my summer and reminisce about my experience.

My official job title while working for the real-estate company Progress Property Services was Business Analyst Intern. One of my first tasks was to reorganize and optimize the company’s extremely large database so that data retrieval could be more efficient. This also included analyzing different sets of data to find any trends and statistics. Along with this, I helped develop several web pages for the company’s employees and wrote a couple of blog posts on real-estate topics (one of which can be found here).

Working with the different company databases was arguably my favorite task that I was assigned. I learned that I was good at finding and noticing trends and could present the data in an easily understandable way. This type of work also led me to feel as though I was making a positive impact on the company and that something I was implementing was truly valuable.

I was fortunate enough that I ran into very few issues while interning and living abroad. I got settled in the flat I was staying at easily and even had got a guided tour of the area I was living in. I stayed near Camden, so I was very close to the center of London. This made transportation around the city extremely convenient. The only real major problem I ran into was the week the train station workers went on strike, which affected my commute to work. Fortunately, my supervisors were very understanding and told me not to stress too much about what time I arrived that day.

I knew interning abroad would challenge me to grow both professionally and personally. I learned early in the internship that I really enjoyed the data analytic aspects of my tasks, so I’m excited to work more towards my data analytics minor. This was also my first time working in a professional workplace setting, so it was great getting experience in that different environment. I learned firsthand the importance of communication among my coworkers and genuinely enjoyed collaborating on different projects with the other interns. I was learning something every day while also genuinely enjoying each workday, so now I know exactly what kind of work setting to look for when I am working postgrad.

London itself has five different airports, so I was able to travel to a couple of different countries during my summer, including France, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Spain. I quickly realized that traveling is one of my passions. Even if it was just for the weekend, immersing myself in a new culture was an exciting new adventure. Europe itself is so different from the United States. I feel now that I can appreciate different aspects of each country I visited.

I have come back to Arkansas with a new-found motivation to succeed in my major. I am excited to utilize the skills I developed over the summer in my future studies and employment. My plan for the future includes completing my degree at Arkansas and continuing to develop my professional network. And of course, planning my return trip to London!