Summer Intern Review

I enjoyed the internship quite a lot and felt that I learnt a lot from the experience.

I felt valued by my colleagues and they always took time to explain what they were doing to me. Because of the nature of the team I was working in, they weren't always able to give me real work to do, which was a bit of a shame. However during those times they always gave me tasks to improve the skills that I would need on the job and made me feel that what I was doing might not be valuable to them in the short term, but would be in the long term.

Both on my rotation and in my main team the people I was working for always gave me lots of support and guidance. Whenever I got stuck I always felt like I could go and ask them a question. They didn't always tell me the answer right away, but instead often gave me hints so that not only could I still have the satisfaction of solving the problem myself, but also learnt a lot more.

I almost always had stuff to do and the deadlines I was given were very manageable. I think I would have liked to feel slightly busier at times so that I could really push myself and see what I could achieve under pressure. I guess though if I had been really busy I'd have found that I didn't actually enjoy it so I guess I got the best of both worlds.

For my main project, I was the only person working on it and when my boss went on holiday he officially left me in charge of the project so I guess you could say I had a lot of responsibility. However he always came over to check it and look over it on a regular basis so I never felt I had that much responsibility.

I think there are a lot of skills which I have developed which will be very useful later on. In particular I have learnt from scratch 3 computing languages, Python, C# and VBA, having only known MATLAB before. We were also given lots of financial training including a whole week in the classroom at the beginning, which I think will be useful to me in the future.

The atmosphere was friendly and about as relaxed as any trading floor could be. You hear horror stories about trading floors, but I never heard anyone swear or shout at anyone and you got the feeling that if anything like that did happen it would be a very rare event. I know it sounds cliche but the atmosphere on the floor was really buzzing especially as all the TV screens were showing Bloomberg, SKY and BBC News so you could hear people's reactions to the news immediately. When something big happens you can almost hear it going across the room.

It was very well organised and structured and with regular reviews to catch up on how you were getting on. Also when I got on my desk they already had a very clear idea of what my project was going to be and the direction that it was going to take.

The company invested a lot in our personal training and development. Our first week we were in the classroom all day every day doing a crash course in finance with everything from money markets, derivatives and even a bit of accounting. Then when I got on my desk my boss immediately gave me a link to an online course where I could learn Python, which I spent a day or two doing before I started my project properly. On my rotation they also spent a lot of time training me on the basics of stochastic calculus.

If you want to work at an investment bank I would strongly recommend this one. However as with the whole banking sector, I would expect job security to be much lower than in other sectors.

Yes although as everyone had different work hours the interns rarely managed to all meet up at the same time.

We were working in the City of London so the cost was very expensive.

Again the bank is based in the City of London so the night life was good, but expensive. It can also get very busy though and be a bit difficult to find somewhere to go sometimes. There are two outdoor bars right in front of the building where the company is based where most people tend to gather.

Yes a couple. The main one was a 5km race which all the interns either ran in or helped marshall. In general though because everyone's work hours are different there weren't that many company wide activities.