Intern Review

I really enjoyed my experience. My team was very helpful and friendly and we all received professional external training to get up to speed on asset management and learn more about BlackRock.

I was given important work from the outset which was of actual use to the company. My colleagues gave me challenging work but there was always adequate support on hand. Even the MD on the team offered to help me when I was stuck on a problem.

I really got on with my manager well so I found that I could approach him with problems. There were times when the initial explanation of a task wasn't clear enough for me. Although I always felt as if I could approach anyone on my team, people were usually very busy and at times it seemed that asking for clarification could waste their time.

This varied hugely, there were times when I would go for coffees with members of other teams to learn about the business and take a full lunch break but on some occasions I would get into work at 7 and leave at 8 or 9. Usually I wasn't overly busy but project work is variable by nature.

All of the work I was given was actually relevant and useful to my team. At the beginning I was given easier work to gauge my understanding and skill level but by the end I was entrusted with writing a document that is usually written by Directors and MD's on the team. Often my work was only reviewed briefly before before being distributed across the business. I could not have asked for more responsibility to be given to me during an internship.

BlackRock puts an emphasis on presentation skills and during my time I made numerous presentations of varying degrees of importance. The skills I learnt through these presentations and the formal training provided has helped me with my presentations at university.I would say that the skills I learnt overall are quite useful for the world of finance but are not particularly relevant to my degree.

There was a really friendly atmosphere in my office. Everyone seemed to get along but also knew how to focus on work when they needed to. People were always eager to help me and I went on numerous coffees where I found out more about what each person in my team did and how the team worked with the business as a whole.

The internship was really well organised with a lot of extra learning events and workshops set up for the interns. Campus recruitment were fully dedicated to the smooth running of the internship and this really helped everything to run smoothly even though there were 100+ interns.

After completing the internship BlackRock will decide whether to extend you a graduate position in your division. This depends primarily on your individual performance but can also depend on business need and head count in your team. It is fairly difficult to move from one team to another both during and after the internship so it is important to decide which team you want to work in before applying for the internship.

There were about 20/30 people out of the 100 who tended to socialise after work. I found this a bit on the low side however by Friday the week was quite tiring and London is an expensive City so I can understand this.In hindsight a few more BlackRock events could have encouraged more people to go out on a Friday.

Luckily I lived at home but I know that accommodation was very expensive for some people. Obviously as it was London food and drink was very expensive but BlackRock did pay well. One minor issue was that the monthly pay came after the first months work and paying for accommodation and commuting before this could become quite tight. A relocation loan/allowance could have been useful.

It was London so the Nightlife was quite good (although expensive), shore ditch was close and quite a good place fore a night out. BlackRock is in the heart of the City so there were also a lot of reasonably priced pubs nearby which were usually quite lively by 5 or 6 o'clock every day during the summer.