I joined Bean Research for a six-week internship expecting to sharpen my analytical skills. I am leaving with those, but also with a much better sense of how programme evaluation actually works in practice. This is something I now know I could not have picked up from a textbook.
The projects
My main focus was a multi-partner mental health and suicide prevention initiative. I collected and cleaned the raw data, managed some client communications, and pulled together summaries for 11 clubs. Spotting trends in those numbers and contributing to the End of Year report showed me how large initiatives measure success, and how the reporting then shapes what happens next.
I also worked on the Scottish Government’s CashBack for Communities programme , pulling together different data sources to build profiles of what clients had achieved. I also populated the team’s new Monday.com database with more than 100 client and funder accounts and set out a standard input approach so the data stays clean as the team grows.
What I learnt beyond the projects
Uniform programmes are not uniform on the inside. You might assume that all the partners delivering one funded programme, operate in roughly the same way because the headline goal is shared. They do not. Each has its own history, its own way of running things, and its own view of what success looks like. Getting under that took patience, but it changed how I read any dataset and I came to understand that the real story often hides beneath the surface.
Deadlines in the real world move. While at university, a deadline is a deadline, in consultancy, deadlines are stitched together across multiple organisations, and when one moves everything shifts. What matters is being able to absorb the change without losing quality: asking for help early, re-prioritising, and being clear about what can and cannot move with it.
Time in the tools matters. Extended use of Excel, Word and the rest of the Microsoft stack meant I started using them more proficiently. I learnt that you cannot pick up workplace judgement from a training video. Experience I gained from sitting in the office, joining meetings and listening to how senior people handle conversations was invaluable.
Thank you to Bean Research and to King’s Civic Leadership Academy for the opportunity, and to the wider Bean team for the patience, the guidance, and the trust to run with things independently. I am leaving with sharper technical skills and a clearer picture of what good evaluation looks like in practice.
Charlotte Leung
