Studied: BSc Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, KCL
My first seat and second seat were very similar in terms of subject matter; I sat in the Disputes Energy team followed by the Project Finance team. My focus during these seats was predominately within the oil & gas sectors and nuclear decommissioning, with work ranging from: (i) a contractual dispute between a gas company and a contractor, (ii) a complex financing arrangement for the acquisition of a floating production, storage and offloading vessel, and (iii) advisory work for a contractor on their decommissioning obligations. As you can imagine, the documents provided in all these projects were highly technical so being accustom to reviewing large volumes of data and being able to quickly summarise and compare information (a quality I learned from my undergraduate degree reviewing research papers and experimental results) was particularly useful.
My third seat was in General Corporate, which coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a particularly interesting time to be in the Corporate team as clients struggled to navigate the economic restrictions imposed by the UK government. This resulted in a number of emergency share issuances for several of our clients to raise money to help preserve and/or repair their balance sheets. One key role I was involved in was verification; the process of confirming all facts and figures in a company's marketing materials were accurate (failure to do so could result in claims being brought against the company). This required reviewing, again, large volumes of documents but also checking for consistency and ensuring all numbers from the financial models were correctly transposed and interpreted in any public documents. Having a good eye for detail, and being accustom to spreadsheets and modelling from my undergraduate degree, was helpful in running these exercises.
My fourth and final seat is at a client, Willis Towers Watson ("WTW"), where I work closely with their corporate development team to assist with strategic acquisitions and disposals of companies. One particular focus for WTW to date has been in the climate change risk advisory space, which has resulted in two key acquisitions within this sector. My STEM degree is valuable on my secondment in two key ways: (i) I had a general interest in the underlying subject matter of the acquisitions and enjoyed learning how this expertise is applied in a commercial context, and (ii) by learning to manage my own projects and laboratory experiments at university I developed my project management skills which were useful when running several different acquisitions simultaneously.
