Institutuional Securities Spring Insight Review

The overall spirit of the Insight was quite competitive, probably because there was an assessment center at the end and the recruitment officers were observing us throughout the week. I met really nice and friendly people, but at the same time there were some that tended to be quite pushy.

Some business representatives were really approachable and this made me feel valued. However, I could not say the same for everyone cause I also met quite arrogant people. As well as that the recruitment officers did not tend to be really nice and I was refused five minutes break to meet a representative of the business who wanted to give me some advice.

Not at all, neither personal guidance. Everybody from the spring week was emailing about tens of Morgan Stanley employees and if you want to ask somebody a private question there is no opportunity to do that. You have to always compete for their attention. As well as that we had absolutely no idea until Wednesday evening what the Thursday and Friday will look like.

It is too early to decide. What I can note is that I have become more confident and I always ask questions as I try to use every opportunity to do that for good or bad. I know more about the desk structure of the sales and trading floor but this is not really useful for my studies.

The first two days were well structured with business line presentations and interactive sessions when I could really well understand the type of work for each division. However we were not told anything about our divisional days until the evening before the first one of them. This felt really bad and stressful.

As I already said there were some people there who were quite pushy and competitive. It was hard to find a good time to talk to a business representatives because some people were competing on asking questions, cliche questions. Apart from that we did not see the actual Morgan Stanley office until Thursday.

There was not any training there. Apart from a little presentation about the financial industry which presented quite obvious things which I am sure everybody is familiar with, there was no other training. The accent was more on presentations about the firm rather than personal development and I personally did not like that.

We did not have much time for work-shadowing. Actually we only had 2x30 min sessions in trading and 2x30 min sessions in sales which really not enough. We had a lot of panel discussions which maybe will be a positive thing for some people, but I personally would prefer more real insight into the day-to-day work. On the other hand, I am really positive to the interactive sessions with the different lines of business. They were very insightful and you can understand a lot about a particular role through them. There was also a building tour when we were allowed to have a look only through the windows and not actually see the floors which was ridiculous.

We had quite a lot of time dedicated on Morgan Stanley's culture and this is something I highly appreciate.

It was really helpful in therms of the divisional decision. Although I had already made it I actually become more sure about it after the interactive sessions. I would personally prefer more time with my chosen division. For example not two days but three or four. But this really depends on the person, because some people had not yet decided what division they wanted to go to even after the third day.

Hopefully, I will be reimbursed for my travel expenses and I was provided accommodation. However what I found a little bit annoying was that about a month before the Spring Week I had no information about accommodation and travel. Then suddenly I received an email that I have to book my travel within 72 hours, otherwise I will not be reimbursed.

There were some networking opportunities where people were nice and approachable. However, it was hard to ask everything you want to know due to the fact that everybody was asking questions constantly. I would say that we needed some more business representatives. The only time I had a really valuable conversation was on the networking dinner on Friday.

There were some good networking opportunities, however, we definitely needed more business representatives.

We had sessions about life at Morgan Stanley, their charity activities, panel discussions with members from different employee networks. Actually we had almost the whole Wednesday for that. We were actually involved in their charity activity making emergency packages for the people who were going to run the marathon on Sunday.

I would recommend it because apart from some organisational problems which mostly come from the campus recruitment department overall Morgan Stanley is an amazing company. There are nice people as well as arrogant, but I think that is the case for every company of that size. A huge advantage is the amazing conversion opportunity for the Summer Analyst program in the next year.