Hi! I’m Zoe and I am now in week 3 of my internship in Audit at the Grant Thornton Southampton office. On top of doing something different every day, I have experienced a huge range of environments with my first day spent in London, then working in an electrical company, training in Bradenham and finally work in a Ferrari Garage!
Even though I’ve only been with the Southampton team for 3 weeks, I feel like I’ve learnt so much already – mainly through asking about a thousand questions to everyone and anyone! But people are so patient and kind answering them. My highlight so far has been the few days at Bradenham; learning presentation skills, having the chance to socialise with some of the other interns and being taught how to make the perfect Pimm’s by Phillip the bartender.
This year some of the interns have been given the task of fundraising for their offices’ chosen charity through whatever creative methods they wish. I decided to do the Grant Thornton Ironman Challenge!
When challenged with the fundraising task in London, my group of twelve decided to do something sporty, but importantly also fun. After hearing about all the amazing fundraising ideas and events that have happened across the Grant Thornton offices’, we put our heads together to come up with something that was challenging, but not quite as scary as abseiling down a building! And so the IronMan Challenge was born!
A regular Ironman normally consists of cycling 112 miles, running 26.2 miles and swimming 2.4 miles in one day. We decided to set our target as the distance from the most Southern Grant Thornton office in Southampton to the most Northern Grant Thornton office in Edinburgh. This meant that the target was to be 407 miles. However, once word got out about the challenge our group grew from twelve to fourteen and we felt that 30 miles each was just not enough. So we doubled the distance!
In total as a group we would have to complete 814 miles through a combination of cycling, swimming and running. For those of you like me who aren’t great at mental maths, that means individually we have to complete 58.143 miles over the course of the internship. The donations made by each individual will go to their offices’ own chosen charity, allowing a wide range of charities to benefit from our challenge. As of Week 3, I have learnt from this challenge that waking up six in morning to go for a run is perhaps a bit ambitious and that I should instead wait until I get home from work as I will be much more productive and do more miles!
Good luck to the rest of the IronMan intern team who are ploughing on with their mileage!