Summer Analyst Review

Every bank will tell you that the culture at their respective workplaces is their differentiating factor. While I cannot assess other banks, I can testify that HSBC's culture is actually as good as they say it is. People make you feel welcome, valued and most importantly they generally care about your development.

Although you may not always get the best and most interesting tasks as an intern, people do value your input at HSBC and that makes you feel an integral part of the team. On top of that, interns underwent technical training for LBO modeling. As an intern you're rarely responsible for delivering such an output and the fact that they were still willing to train us says a lot about how much they value our development.

Investment banking is a busy life. People generally do not have time to cater to each and every one of your needs. It is really up to the intern to figure out how much you can handle on your own and what you need to ask for help with. I found out that once you ask, people will be always willing to help out.

It really depends on the project. There are some projects that will keep you busy on a constant basis until late at night; and others that will stay quite for most the time and only rarely bring up new work requirements. It's a combination of the type of deal, stage in the deal process and type of buyer that mostly influence how busy each project will keep you.

Responsibility is something that you earn with time and by proving your worth. You will never be given a lot of responsibilities on your first week. But as you start delivering on time and producing good quality output your colleagues will realize how helpful you can actually be and start delegating more and more responsibilities.

On top of financial modeling and powerpoint skills, after having completed a summer internship in investment banking I feel like I can take on any school assignment much more easily that I would have in the past. HSBC prepares you to be efficient, thorough and precise and these are all extremely important qualities in university regardless of your subject of studies.

The atmosphere at HSBC was truly appealing. People were focused and committed during working hours; but also relaxed and easy to talk to when out of the office. I would say HSBC strikes a good balance between the two and it's generally very easy to fit it with the broader team; seniors as well.

The global graduate recruitment team was extremely effective at organizing the internship program. From mixers with senior bankers, to lunch and learn sessions, to guided tours of the firm's archives, and treasure hunts, interns felt like the HR team really put a lot of effort into making their experience memorable. I think this is distinguishing feature of the internship program at HSBC as compared to other banks.

The firm organized a one week training sessions where we were taught personal and communication skills, accounting concepts, and financial modeling skills. During the course of the internship we also received specialized training in building a leveraged buyout model and improving our presentation style. Overall I feel like the bank took our development very seriously.

My intern class was overall very social and easy to talk to. Often times we would find ourselves organizing weekend events and dinners to start bonding with each other early on. Additionally, rather than being in competition with each other, we generally tried to help out one another because that's what you feel like doing at HSBC.