IBD summer analyst Review

I didn’t love the internship but I also didn’t hate it. It was great having the opportunity to work at such an amazing firm but the actual experience wasn’t the best. Some of the people were great whilst others clearly didn’t respect the interns at all. Overall I’d say it was okay.

It’s difficult to feel valued as an intern as a lot of the people we came across didn’t seem to care about what we were learning or what we were doing and that we simply didn’t get in their way. I wouldn’t give it a terrible score because HCM seem invested in the interns, however a lot of the actual banker employees only cared about you if you came from the same country as them or spoke their language.

I benefited from the buddy system and the mentor system which was helpful and they have weekly office hours where you can speak to HR and the summer captains who were another support system. You can tell that a big effort was made here by the firm, however I must admit that the system felt quite artificial and there was no confidentiality (learnt the hard way)

It varied from day to day. Some days I would come in at 10am and leave at 4/5am, whereas other days I’d be done by 10pm. Sometimes this included a busy morning and a slower evening whilst some days this was the other way around. It’s difficult to say but all of my days were long but not necessarily that busy.

I was given a decent amount of responsibility at some points but only with small tasks. My job mainly consisted of creating PowerPoints and perfecting the formatting of my work. I think responsibility was primarily based on trust and prior experience but overall I would say I was given a less-than-satisfactory amount.

I don’t think that my degree is that heavily related to the work I was doing in my internship. However, I Believe that the internship has taught me that there are many hours in the day that I need to make the most of which I has improved my time management

People weren’t very friendly or inclusive despite the fact that there were so many talks on diversity and inclusion throughout the internship which was quite disappointing. However I learnt how to deal with these people and I got used to it over the course of my internship.

It was very organised. One thing I like about the investment baking division is the number of talks we had on the different teams and the good communication maintained by HCM. They constantly kept us updated with events and opportunities so I’m glad. One thing I didn’t like was the fact that the first rotation was 5 weeks in the internship but the second was 4.

Yes especially at the beginning when we had our really good raining session with the excel guy who came in externally - you can tell that HCM we’re making efforts. However, on the actual floors it definitely was not the best experience because people were clearly a lot less interested

They’re decent I think. It is very broad to comment on this but they say that there is space for everyone to get a job on the internship and they are always happy to discuss the process with us. It’s less likely to work there if you’re not a certain profile that they think fits in which is sad

No the social scene was so sparse, mainly because we didn’t have much time to actually socialise and generally there aren’t that many people who are willing to organise things because we were all so so busy! Many of the M&A teams seemed so antisocial unfortunately but towards the end when things were slower it improves a little

I moved to Farringdon which is a 10 minute walk away from the firm so it was a very expensive area with a very high cost of living. However, given the hours we are working it’s definitely to work out of the office and glow

It was decent with a few clubs and bars locally. We went to a lot of bars especially for the networking events which really familiarised us with the area. I really really enjoyed it!

No there weren’t that many out of work opportunities. We had an event called CTW where we did charity work for the day. However, despite the occasional drinks with the whole team, I think it was tricky to make events outside of work - especially because we have no free time