Pre-internship Review

Highly informative - in a one-liner - it's well worth the week. I got exposure to what it means to work as a technology employee within a bank, and the coding challenge itself was very well-structured - those two were my primary reasons for attending and I came away satisfied.

J.P. Morgan was very upfront about it - they were looking for talent and people to be filtered into their separate and early internship assessment centre. It's not so much about individual contribution to the coding challenge. Rather, it's individual performance throughout the week.

People are always on-hand to answer questions during normal days. The tech-related questions during the coding challenges were resolved just like that. Fantastic response time. The employee I work shadowed was probably the most helpful one of all in terms of giving insight into working in a bank.

The sessions were not so much about developing transferable skills. It's their demonstration, so, no, I don't think the information given beyond what it means to work within the industry is applicable elsewhere.

First day was mixed lectures/talks with bankers, so that was largely irrelevant to me as a technologist. Sure, I have a background and interest in economics but it doesn't help that the speaker largely ignores the tech audience and speaks in jargon that I don't understand, which defeats the purpose of being in the talk. The rest of the technology talks were much better. Work shadowing session was magnificently helpful, coding challenge very well thought out and executed. I thought the teamwork (lego, strings and marshmallow) sessions were rather contrived. The mad scramble for other groups' lego blocks to even finish one building model to the client's specifications overrides all coordinative efforts, and he wants a city's worth of them, which I thought was amusing. At least the session was fun.

I particularly enjoyed the company of the other pre-interns. In talking with them, I found they shared similar concerns and expectations. I thought the general environment was very nice for the event, but then again the event is held in the conference floor of 25 Bank St, so..

It's not so much training rather than observation and giving a sense of what it means to work in the finance industry and whether that's what the individual wants to do as a career.

Much of this comes from the work-shadowing session. It's very short and only answers the general questions. Too much emphasis was placed on software development, and the whole aspect about working as a technologist with the servers and hardware was missed. They talked about old mainframes and migratory issues, what about people working with those?

While they did really try to get exactly this point across, one week is way too short to see what working in a company really is like beyond what they tried to show during the week.

Very helpful in general, but as mentioned previously, certain areas were missing, such as hardware.

Travel / accomodation expenses paid for

Plenty

Two or three dedicated sessions, free to do so at any other time

Only that there is a gym in the building. This was only seen during the building tour

If they have at least considered working as a technologist within the finance industry, this will help them decide.