Summer Intern Review

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at the bank however I wish the tasks that I was set were more academically challenging.

I felt as though I was a useful member of the team and my colleagues always made the effort to include me.

Though I valued being given independence and having the ability to shape my internship, it would have been nice to have had more support from my managers. If not for my drive I feel as though I could have wasted 7 weeks at the bank.

The degree to which I was busy fluctuated from day to day according to the number of customers that walked through the door on a given day as I was in retail banking.

Though I was trusted with access to large amounts of information, I felt as though this made my managers weary to leave me on meet and greet unsupervised - this may however be due to the fact that I am quite young though.

I feel as though I have learnt a great deal about managing my own personal finances from seeing the mistakes made by many customers. I have also greatly improved my ability to handle difficult customers from standing on meet and greet in the bank. I do however wish the internship had been more academically challenging so I could have developed more niche skills.

The staff were very talkative and charismatic however I did at times feel excluded from their conversations.

My internship lacked structure and was shaped by my own determination - though this worked well for me, it isn't ideal for everyone.

Though I was given a lot of e learning to complete at the start of my internship, I didn't feel it prepared me for the work I had to do. Everything that I needed to learn, I found out on the job which made my first week very difficult when I had to help customers. However, once I got the hang of things, I had no problems at all. I did feel that HSBC was very keen on focusing on my long term personal development as I was invited to attend two different events focused around it.

The internship is very much focused around the long term job prospects at the bank.

There were plenty of social and networking opportunity organised by different interns, however they were difficult to access if you were not based in London.

I was placed locally so my costs were minimal.

All interns were encouraged to get involved in charity work and we collectively took part in events to fundraise for Marie Curie.