Markets Intern Review

Interning at JP Morgan is an incredibly rewarding and challenging experience. Over the 10 week internship there are high expectations placed on interns which means at times the experience is highly pressured. While stressful, this responsibility means that your learning is accelerated and by week 4 you are completing tasks and meeting targets that you wouldn't have dreamed off before the internship. Interns were not encouraged to compete against each other in any way, lending itself to a very social experience.

While there are obvious boundaries on what an intern can do, full-time senior staff took a real interest in propelling the learning of junior employees and interns. No matter how senior an employee was, if they had time, they would sit down with me and go through any questions or areas of interest I had. MDs and VPs had no issue with going back to basics with interns and took a genuine interest in our learning. Therefore, while our work may not have always been valued an interns personal development was highly valued.

HR have organised a very strong support network for interns. With Buddys, Program Leads, Senior Mentors, interest groups (eg. networking events for Irish junior staff), line managers, there was always someone to direct questions and queries to. There was also a strong HR presence throughout the internship through email newsletter and events.

At the start of the internship I found myself with relatively slow, empty days. However, as I began to learn and understand the business more I was given more work. I was also given the opportunity to create my own work and projects. This allowed me to research and generate ideas on an area of interest and present it back to my team.

I was given the opportunity to create, lead and execute my own projects. These involved co-ordination with other interns, analysts and more senior staff. I was completely in charge of these projects, with the only expectation being that I feedback my learning and results at the end of the internship. In my desk-specific tasks I was given responsibility to interact with senior-staff and given exposure to important meetings and documents.

Skills for Life is definitely how I would define my learning from JP Morgan. During my internship I learned how to effectively network, how to communicate in a corporate environment, how to strike the balance between personable and professional and more. In a technical sense, I also increased my product knowledge, my technical Excel and Bloomberg skills and my analytical abilities. Additionally, just preparing for the interview alone led me to perform better in my degree studies.

There was a great buzz on the trading floor during active hours. There was a great sense of fun among certain teams, however this varied a lot. Generally, the atmosphere was that employees were happy to be there and highly motivated in their jobs. However, there was also a sense that hard work and long hours were an expected, meaning often meaningless face-time was clear in some of the interns and junior staff.

The standard internship was very well organised. However, the rotations element of the internship was not clearly communicated pre-internship and caused a lot of stress and confusion among interns. HR took on feedback very positively and were always keen to improve the program, which was a really strong positive. I felt HR were never more than an email request away.

The first week of our internship was intern training which was to an incredibly high standard. For one week we were in a very luxurious training venue where the basics of a range of financial instruments were covered. This was a great opportunity for me to get familiar with some terminology, coming from a non-finance background. This was complimented with Bloomberg and Excel training. Additionally, weekly Teach-Ins, hosted by full-time staff, were to a high standard.

I was offered a return job with the firm. I look forward to taking up this role based on my positive internship experience. Future employment prospects are really strong, with a high level of mobility (between roles and offices) evident from junior staff. There also seemed to be a huge emphasis on retention, with even employees whose departments were getting cut being encouraged to take their time to look around the firm for another area of interest.

Canary Wharf is a very corporate area, meaning that lunches and amenities were quite expensive. The JP Morgan canteen was generally quite reasonably priced but interns could easily find all their money disappearing at the end of the week. Socialising was quite expensive but it was a very nice area with lots of cool spots.

The Canary Wharf area is quite expensive and very corporate. Probably too fancy for interns, so we took the opportunity to travel into the city for nightlife. There wasn't a huge emphasis on partying during the internship as most interns were too tired from long hours to go to clubs.

There were some opportunities, such as Business Resource Groups and the Corporate Run, but often interns were too busy with work to take the opportunity to attend these. In terms of the internship, there was a huge array of intern events (mandatory) that helped with networking and learning more about the firm. For example, senior leader breakfasts and talks about philanthropy, the firms digital strategy and more.