Summer Internship Review

It was quite enjoyable to learn about how the banking industry worked. I was pleased with how even senior members of staff would happily give up their time to explain their roles. The internship has various opportunities to attend social events and network with graduates. The CSR challenge interesting as we were able to work with interns across different roles at RBS.

The internship can have a slow start, particularly if you do not have systems access. But once I had a good understanding of the role and systems access I was able to contribute to tasks within and across the teams. Colleagues invited to weekly minutes and market updates and I was also invited to go client meetings with relationship directors.

My supervisor was quite a busy person but we both insured that we had weekly meetings so I could update him on my progress. In our first meeting we had discussed expectations and objectives of the internship and how I go about completing them. This gave me the opportunities to seek opportunities independently, but also ask for help if required.

During the beginning of the internship I was not as busy, as I was still learning more about my role. Later, I got the opportunity to attend a lot of meetings which kept me busy. As I started to get a better understanding of the role, the days got quite busy and the hours flew by.

I think most people are RBS understand that we are interns and this is our first time experiencing commercial banking. Therefore, the internship started with simple responsibilities but these began to grow as more colleagues were able to view my work and trust in my ability to provide a good contribution to more challenging tasks.

I think the internship really helped develop my preparation organisational skills. When I was working in commercial banking, I got the opportunity to work with many different teams and I had several deadlines. So the internship taught me how to plan and organise my day so I was able to complete the deadlines on time or early to account for any unplanned events or circumstances.

The atmosphere in the office was friendly, staff were interested in meeting new interns and were happy to explain their role. It was possible to walk up to anyone (providing they were free and not with a client) to discuss work. The atmosphere could be loud at times as several relationship managers could be speaking to their clients.

I think the internship could have been set up better. We were told we had to book flights to Edinburgh quite late and then many interns found it hard to look for flights within the RBS budget. The budget was later increased after several discussions with the HR. There was issues with systems access so I had to wait a while before I could look at client data.

I think RBS invests quite a bit in their interns. They flew all of us out to Edinburgh so that we could have a 3-day training course to understand their values and what to expect. They also thoroughly explained how we were going to be tested in the course of the internship, and invited graduates to give their advice.

Good. I think the graduate scheme does provide great training opportunities and careers prospect as you have the opportunity to rotate to different roles. I still need to learn about opportunities available after employees are successful in their graduate role. However, I did observe a few employee cuts or transfers to new locations in the bank.

Yes, there regular graduate and interns meetups for drinks or career advice. Interns would regularly meet up for lunch and go out for drinks at the end of the day. The mid internship event also bought together interns from different locations, so we were able to socialise with new people.

Train tickets in London at peak time are quite expensive.

I worked in the city of london, so the nice life is always good.

Yes, there are many sporting and charity events.