Justin Matthew
2026 Saltire Scholar
Process Mapping & Improvement Intern, Entrepreneurial Scotland
Studying Business Analysis and Business Law at the University of Strathclyde.
My name is Justin and I study Business Analysis and Business Law at the University of Strathclyde. I applied to the Saltire Scholars Programme for an internship that would give me a deeper understanding of how an organisation works, rather than just observing, and I aimed to come out of it with sharper analytical skills and a clearer sense of what I could offer a workplace.
This summer, I interned with Entrepreneurial Scotland itself as the Programme Mapping & Improvement Intern, embedded within the Scholars Operations Team. It's a small team of eight, running a Programme with a 15-month operational cycle spanning applications, assessment centres, global internships, and a long-standing alumni community. My job was to get inside that machinery: map the full end-to-end lifecycle, understand why each process exists the way it does, and work out where it could run more efficiently, including where AI tools might help.
The team I joined doesn't use AI in their day-to-day work, so before I could make any recommendations, I focused on more basic AI tasks. I ran a series of workshop sessions with the team to introduce them to Claude from scratch, covering “connectors” and how to build and maintain “skills” so a useful workflow could be reused rather than rebuilt from nothing every time. We worked through real examples pulled from their own week: the templated emails, the trackers updated in three places, the small repetitive jobs that quietly eat up a day. Teaching people who had never used a tool like this meant slowing down, being honest about its limits, and building their confidence with small wins before anything more ambitious.
I mapped the Programme's full lifecycle using BPMN. This meant sitting down individually with team members to understand not just what they do but why, and where their work connects to everyone else's. Having that complete map gave the team, for the first time, a clear picture of where their time and effort was really going, and it meant that when we talked about AI, we weren't guessing where it belonged. The map pointed plainly to the tedious, repetitive admin as the highest-value place for Claude to help, and just as clearly showed where it shouldn't go near: the parts of the Programme built on judgement, rapport, and real conversations with candidates/host companies. That distinction, that AI should clear the tedious work out of the way rather than replace the people doing the meaningful work, became the guiding principle behind everything I recommended.
The clearest measure of impact is that the team is now using the “skills” we built together in their actual day-to-day work, and the process map I produced is the reference document they're using to plan how the Programme's operations evolve going forward. Watching people who'd never touched Claude before start using it confidently, and knowing the map I built is shaping real decisions about the Programme's future, was genuinely the most rewarding part of the summer.
The most valuable shift for me has been realising that explaining something clearly to someone who's never seen it before is a completely different skill from understanding it yourself, and it's one I didn't know I needed to build. Translating BPMN diagrams and AI concepts into something a busy team could actually pick up and use took far more patience and structure than I expected, and I came away far more confident in my ability to teach, present, and hold my own in a room of people far more experienced than me.
To any student considering the Saltire Scholars Programme, my advice is to see it as a genuine opportunity to put yourself out there. Every intern on the programme has a great summer, but no two summers look alike, because every project, host, and team is different, and that's exactly what makes it worth doing. It gives you a real taste of how a workplace actually operates, with all the ambiguity and responsibility that comes with that, but within a genuinely supportive environment where people want you to succeed.
