This review was submitted over 4 years ago, so some of the information it contains may no longer be relevant.
It was a great experience, thanks both to RBCCM that organises brilliant internships and to the city of London which offers awesome nightlife and out of office activities
My manager was great and gave me a lot of support. The rest of the colleagues weren't as supportive but always happy to chat and teach things involved in their job.
My manager followed me thoroughly during the course of the project he asked me to do for him. If sometimes markets kept him too busy, he might help less but he would still call me up to show me what was going on in the markets and discuss a bit.
I had to complete an ongoing project, so the workload highly depended on how much I wanted to focus on it. There might be days in which I couldn't advance that much and the markets kept colleagues too busy to try and ask for help, but in general it was a good balance of workload as step by step I completed the project during the 8 weeks of internship.
My task was to develop a model that is now a useful tool for the traders in the bank. However, due to my full commitment to this project, I wasn't very involved in the day to day work that my team did.
This experience highly contributed to my personal growth in terms of establishing relationships with work colleagues, learning a lot more about the financial markets and life on a trading floor. After the experience, I was also sure that a career in the financial markets is really what I want to pursue.
It was great. Obviously there were periods of stress, especially in these times of stress in the markets themselves, but colleagues were nearly always in a good mood and friendly.
Great. Apart from the daily work on the trading floor, during which I was closely followed by my manager, HR organised many activities such as a weekly trading game involving all interns.
I would say in a period of 8 weeks it is hard to really give a big amount of personal training. Nonetheless, I learned a lot from my manager and also just staying on a trading floor and following the work of other people. The internship program also included a day at the Bloomberg offices for training.
Company Parties/Events
I am awaiting response for taking part to the Graduate Program that follows the summer internship with a gap year in between. The banking industry is a tough industry to get into overall at these times, but RBC is well positioned and is one of the few banks that still recruits a lot.
Great time with other interns, some of which will probably still be friends if distance permits it.
Probably the only downside, expensive life...but the pay should make up for it.
London's nightlife is awesome.
Even though the long working hours don't allow for so much time to spend during the week outside work, if you get active there are a lot of activities one can join as London has so many people who have the same life balance. I used to play football and badmington weekly with colleagues/interns, and go out on weekends.
Internship (1-4 Months)
Central London and City
September 2011