Spring Into Technology Review

It was a really great programme, packed with interesting speakers, team challenges, and work shadowing, plus social events two of the three days in the evening. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though they were forced to pack all of it into just the three days so it became pretty exhausting by the end of the program.

I felt extremely valued. Besides the fact that they put us up in a very nice hotel in the centre of town and paid for our travel, they also mentioned several times that they had vetted us and knew that we were people they wanted. I'm sure some of that was just sweet talk, but it definitely felt nice to hear.

There was constant support. We had two work shadowing blocks, each one two hours long, where we were split into groups of two and assigned to different employees. When we were in the large group, there were always at minimum two or three employees around to answer questions/run the programme, and during the team competitions they brought in lots of people to help run it. For two of these, each table (of about 4 people) had its own assigned employee to help it.

It was all very interesting, but most of what we did during the programme was team-building exercises and learning what it's like to work at J.P. Morgan. We did do some coding on Tuesday and Wednesday, but it was just Java that I was already fairly familiar with. I think that the practice working on teams will come in handy down the road, though.

It was very well-structured and tightly planned, with a detailed plan handed out in a booklet to every student at the beginning of the week. I was a little confused at one point because the arrival time was different between the booklet and the email they'd sent out previously, but it wound up not really mattering because things took a while to get started in the mornings anyway. Once they did start, though, things moved at a good pace.

The atmosphere was fine. I met a lot of people and it was nice to make new friends in the industry. It was still in an office building, though, and we were kept busy enough much of the time that it wasn't really party city. For how much quasi-"work" we were doing, and how tired everyone must have been by the end, though, it was a very good atmosphere.

To quite a large extent. The work shadowing helped with this quite a bit, since I was literally sitting in the actual office spaces and talking to an employee about his code and the work that he does. I also talked to a lot of different employees, who had unique experiences but also shed more light on what life is really like at J.P. Morgan.

This was very big throughout the programme. They put a lot of emphasis on teaching us how to work in the real world under the sort of expectations they put on their own employees. I also learned a lot about the culture from the employee I shadowed and from the other employees I talked to.

They paid for my travel to Glasgow (including a first-class ticket for one portion of the trip!) and also put me up in a very nice hotel in the centre of Glasgow (with a double bed, no less!). It was very nice. I did have a little trouble getting set up to order my tickets with the company they do it through, but once I got that straightened out everything worked perfectly.

There were so many opportunities to talk to employees that I can't even begin to count them all. As I said above, they had employees helping us with many of the events so we could talk to them; we also had networking lunches (and a networking dinner one evening), plus the work shadowing and a Q+A session on Wednesday.