The final station in the city of fashion and charm

However, one month is still enough time to do all I need for work, school and still to have some time left to enjoy the Paris summer. Nonetheless, the main reason why I spent the last six months in Paris was to undergo an internship in Holcim company on which I would like to recap.

As I have already mentioned in my last article, I had to get quickly used to the working hours – something very untypical for us, Czech people. At the beginning I just could not imagine to leave work at seven o’clock every day. However, the opposite is true as of today – If I happen to leave at five pm, I have a feeling that something is not right. My main task was to automatize the pricing analysis – for how many Euros on average does the firm sells its products, how does the price evolve every month and what are the consequences of such pricing evolution on our sales. At the beginning of my internship, I did not have an idea of how to approach such a task and with which program I should work. Thanks to the fact that our results are shown in excel in a pivot table, I thought to myself that I should try something with Excel on its own. In January I certainly was not an expert, but that is why I had six months to learn with macros and other neat functions. I managed to put all of it together and to create such a user-friendly application which is connected to the original pivot table and which shows on its own all of the pricing analysis according to the user’s settings. So altogether, this internship has taught me not only to see how a French company works but also how to present different sets of data, how to communicate and hear the wishes of future users of the application and finally – how to work with Excel.

The internship is as I said coming to an end which will give me the whole month of August of some free time – and I believe it will be fully deserved. However, not even holiday should be a reason not to continue education. As a student of Lancaster University I asked my college for a Summer Travel Grant. Luck was on my side and I received a grant of 150 pounds towards my course of financial analysis in Prague. Therefore I will be doing even over the summer something what has been until now my enjoyment and what I hope will one day become my employment. The fourth year in Reims will contribute to this dream a lot as well as I can chose my major subjects and that will certainly be financial analysis of an enterprise and its use in real life. That is why I believe that if I connect my skills gained during the internship, courses and studies at the university, I will have a better chance to enter the job market – but that I will not be able to say with certainty until next year. Till then, I am going back to studying.