Copylab’s Remote Interns Join the Glasgow Team…Virtually

It has, without a doubt, been a tough year for graduates taking their first step into the job market. With recruitment budgets slashed and graduate schemes being postponed indefinitely, at Copylab, we decided to outstretch a (virtual) helping hand and took on not one, but three paid interns this summer.  

Four months, countless Zoom training sessions, and Copylab’s first online internship later, we are proud to welcome our newest additions to the Glasgow investment writing team: Georgina Hodges and Alex Webb. Although we have yet to meet our new colleagues in person, their commitment, attention to detail, and exceptional work ethic continues to shine through Zoom calls and cloud-based document sharing.

Here’s what University of Glasgow graduates Georgina and Alex have to say about their experience:

Georgina:

The highlight of my internship was how varied our day-to-day tasks were. I wrote blogs and tweets, produced marketing copy and research-based work, reviewed my own (terrible) progress in a fantasy fund league, all while gaining experience in producing investment commentaries.

Seeing my progression in both the editing and writing of these commentaries was also a highlight. At the start, I had just graduated with a History degree, so investment writing was new to me. I had applied for the internship to broaden my writing skills away from the academic style of university. My understanding of how financial markets operated was also limited, so I relished the chance to get stuck into learning again – I probably wasn’t ready to give up on uni life just then! There was a lot of material to learn, which was a challenge at first. But with the internship spread out over four months and training from Carmen, Justin and Kathryn, I gradually developed my knowledge and skills in the different aspects of investment writing.

As interns, we became more involved with client work, experiencing how dynamic the industry was and how varied the life of a Copylab writer could be. I enjoyed how creative you can be with investment writing and how it merged my interest in what’s going on in the world, with my passion for reading, writing and editing.

Alex: 

At school and university, the mechanics of writing are given very limited attention. And yet writing to communicate is a skill we use every day. For that reason, the training and patience Copylab provided us while we tried to overcome some deeply ingrained habits was fantastic. Under the Covid-19 restrictions, this remote internship ran the risk of having a very detached learning process. However, the training team was open, responsive and supportive. 

Prior to my introduction to finance, I had studied History, Law and Contemporary China. This exposure to the study of current affairs (and my recurring nightmares of GCSE maths) led me to be most interested in the qualitative side of the investment management industry. For example, I chose to look at discourse analysis around the active-passive management debate for my MFin thesis. An opportunity to join Copylab was therefore the ideal next step. It fused my interest in the communication of investment strategy with exposure to a wide range of topics (asset classes, fund types etc). 

Congratulations to you both, and welcome to Copylab.