Associate (Intern) Review

I really enjoyed my ten weeks at the FCA. As an intern you are given a good deal of exposure to the role of the FCA and its key activities through your day-to-day role and organised intern activities such as learning lunches.

My team were happy to give me a decent level of responsibility once I had found my feet. My colleagues were incredibly friendly and always happy to help; if I ever I needed a question answered there would be somebody willing to give me some time.

I worked closely with my manager and often sat next to them during the day. I think this is relatively rare from what I have heard from other interns (that they see their manager once a week, etc) and I was given a lot of feedback and had formal sit down one-to-one discussions on a weekly basis.

I nearly always had something to be getting on with. I was assigned a project over the ten weeks so when other work dried up I could always fall back on that to keep me busy. There were periods in the early weeks where I was mainly doing reading towards understanding the team's function but after that I was kept fairly busy. That being said, there was never too much work that I felt snowed under.

I was given a reasonable level of responsbility, comparable to what I would expect a graduate in my position to recieve.

The skills will be really useful beyond degree studies. I really felt I picked up on soft skills that you can't really learn in formal education - writing emails and conducting yourself properly in meetings, for example.

It was fairly fun and chatty. Fridays were very sociable and there was always food being given out in the office!

The internship was organised really well. The first few days of induction were a bit dry, but all the organised events after the first week were informative and well-structured. The learning lunches were really helpful in choosing a division for the grad scheme and the community day was a nice chance to get involved in helping the community.

There is a lot invested in the interns. They are paid a competitve internship salary and they recieve a lot of training during the ten weeks.

The graduate scheme is appealing - a two and a half year scheme with internal and external secondments.

It was decent - everybody ate lunch together but there wasn't a lot going on outside of work in the latter weeks. The interns were all very friendly.

Canary Wharf is very expensive. We generally went to Spoons which is a little cheaper.

We didn't go out out - there was a bowling night organised by the FCA but there weren't any nights out.

There is a lot organised - I didn't get the impression they were really there for the interns, however.