CIB Credit risk Review

The internship was a great opportunity to understand the firm as you get to interact with many different teams ranging from IBD to sales, depending on the clients and deals you work on. It is also an opportunity to develop knowledge in a wide range of products, clients and geographies.

The hierarchy is quite flat so you get exposure to pretty senior people depending on the clients you work on. Case studies make it however more challenging to get work directly from colleagues and work is managed by different staffer from other analysts, giving limited opportunity to deviate from planned workload.

Case study work is very well rounded with designated supervisors who however are sometimes forgetful about their responsibility. Weekly catch ups are highly helpful and would recommend pushing for them as they allow for feedback, workload management and useful inputs throughout the internship. Important to make use of buddy as they are probably the best guidance to navigate the teams.

Case study work makes your days quite busy, with an average of 14 hours a day. It adds on top of deskwork, which is also quite intense. Time management is key as deadlines are quite long but you need to break your work into smaller pieces to meet them. Limited weekend work if you achieve this.

Depending on the task, you can be the only analyst working on the client and therefore are expected to know it in and out. This can be quite challenging and require a great attention to detail but it also is rewarding to take full ownership of a client and become the person people turn to when they have questions on it.

Training provided is quite extensive and covers a wide variety of topics. It remains however quite specific to the area and has limited application in academics. Soft skills are quite useful in particular given numerous presentation opportunities and exposure to challenging cases that require a great attention to details / perfectionism.

Depending on the team, you can expect to have more or less fun. Some teams are quite keen to organise socials and include interns when other teams simply dismiss the intern in their teams and have limited appetite for socialising. This probably depends on what everyone's personal lives and can vary every year as rotations take place.

HR runs the programme wonderfully and within the department, quite a few people are responsible for case studies and intern monitoring. They can all be very useful resources and they spend a lot of time working on the programme ensuring that you get exposure to all teams with breakfasts and drinks. Some delays in response and absence of response made it however sometimes stressful.

JPM invests loads in the internship and you get training throughout the 10 weeks not only training that is relevant to your day to day but also on other teams which is valuable for the rotation programme. External firms are of great quality and optional trainings are a must for soft skills development!

Relocation of jobs to cheaper locations and a poor promotion management makes future employment prospect very low. Contingents are being reduced year on year and people leave more and more to go to other teams or companies as they realise that very limited opportunities are available beyond the vice president position.

The internship cohort was very friendly and we never missed an occasion to go out and celebrate the end of any common case study everyone had to go through.

Canary Wharf has loads of opportunities to socialise after work but the cost can sometimes be high.

Never went out in the area as it is limited to bars. We did go out to other places in the city however.

A corporate social responsibility day is organised when you have to volunteer in a place around London, usually to involving gardening. Some clubs exist for sports mostly if you are found of these. A few business resource groups also organise activities outside of work that you can easily be a part of.