Matthew R

00:00:04 My name’s Matthew R. I’m a Management Accountant or Financial Analyst and I work for IBM. I’m responsible for a contract and what we do is monitor the cost and the revenue coming into the account on a month by month basis and then performing sort of analysis on those figures. I like the fact that I do a number of sort of different things and the support structure is very, very good. I think IBM really do look after their graduates, which is certainly something that I think attracted me to the company in the first place.

00:00:35 My father’s in the Armed Forces and my Mother was a Lecturer in critical geopolitics. I went to boarding school at seven, seven until 18, which I found fantastic really. I think it gave me a real sort of sense of independence and responsibility quite early on. I played a lot of sport, like to think I worked hard enough. Particularly enjoyed languages and so ended up studying French and Spanish at university.

00:01:06 My parents never put any pressure on me to either go into the Armed Forces or to go into, you know, academia or anything like that. If there was any pressure at all, it was maybe at university. There was a sort of healthy, competitive pressure that, you know, you’re expected to go on and achieve in the workplace which I thought was actually a really positive influence on me.

00:01:29 For me, university wasn’t such a big step up as I think a lot of my peers possibly found it, just purely based on the fact that I went to boarding school, so I felt always quite sort of comfortable in that environment and being away from home just because that’s all really that I had known. I left university and I worked in recruitment for a year which actually I quite enjoyed but I did feel that it wasn’t possibly for me and I think I always felt deep down that it wasn’t something that was going to challenge me particularly long term.

00:02:02 Once I decided that finance was what I wanted to go into then IBM had been my first job since then. I’m training to be an accountant as well. I’m doing CIMA which is the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, and that was something that I was particularly interested in doing, becoming qualified, becoming a professional. Despite being an accountant, I’m not particularly mathematical, I never really have been. I’ve always been more of an arts person so I actually need a calculator whereas other people might be able to do it in their head, but certainly not me.

00:02:30 I’ve always been fairly sporty. I play football a lot. I play for a Sunday league team on Sundays in London and I play five a side a couple of week nights. Travelling’s always been something that’s interested me along with obviously my languages. In lived in France and Spain for a year and I went to university in Bordeaux and Barcelona. So I’ve travelled fairly extensively in those two countries, but I’ve also sort of been to the States and Australia and places like that which I absolutely love.

00:03:02 I don’t think there’s been any one individual person that’s inspired me. I like to think that I’ve taken onboard sort of advice and inspiration from a number of people either from school or friends or family but I wouldn’t be able and I wouldn’t think it would be fair to just sort of actually attribute, you know, who I am just to the inspiration of one particular person.

00:03:27 I suppose my dream is to get as far as I possibly can doing what I’m doing. I’m very ambitious and motivated and I’m very keen to sort of maximise the opportunities that I’ve been given here and really see how far I can go.