Summer Intern Review

I liked the internship. It is a lot longer than other industries (10 weeks long). This means that you lose steam halfway and you need a lot of stamina to get through all of it. But the length of the internship also meant that you get to know your fellow interns and colleagues for a substantially longer period. On a whole, I noticed that people tended to start opening up only towards the 5th/6th/7th week. So if you go for a shorter placement, you are unlikely to reach that threshold as easily and build lasting relationships as effortlessly, I would imagine.

Departments vary but both my departments treated me very well. For example, in Legal, the more experienced lawyers would offer me advice on my future career paths and would tell me what to avoid and what to look out for etc. And in Compliance, they treat me extremely well too and it is as this rating description says "Like Family". For instance, during the London riots, my colleague offered to walk me home and another colleague gave me her mobile and home phone number to contact her just in case anything untoward should happen.

I was given support and guidance to a large extent. Both my rotation buddies would ask their colleagues to try to get me involved in projects. The co-workers I had worked with would take time to explain things to me as well. I (just) had an informative meeting, organised by a rotation buddy, with someone from the other division that aimed to introduce the work and procedures that division did. HR also organises a lot of lunch & learns, which are "mandatory" by the way. There is also a one week formal classroom training and an e-learning portal with a lot of up-to-date modules you can take.

I wasn't overwhelmed with work. Neither was I left with nothing to do. For compliance especially, if I had extra time, I'd just read more news articles and regulatory updates. And there were also other intern projects given to us by HR. One of them is an Intern Wiki portal where you can add as many (or as little) pages as you want. So the point is, within limits, you can choose how "bored" or "busy" you are by adjusting the amount of flexible/optional work you want to do.

I did quite a bit of work that just required approval and review. I take that as an indicator of being given responsibility. For minor things like adding appendices or checking legal definitions, then obviously you take full responsibility.

As a law student studying English law, I don't think the content is relevant to my degree. We don't do securities law or any finance law or derivatives law etc. in school. The economics knowledge is not relevant to the law course as well. But I think it is the post-degree stage where the IB knowledge will start to become useful - at least for any aspiring city solicitor. As a matter of general knowledge, being able to decode Business Week/ IHT/ FT articles is clearly useful as well.

The trading floor seemed less "fun" in that the atmosphere was more strait-laced and focused (obviously... because they need to monitor immediate price movements or take orders right?). But in the middle/back office, it was more "fun". For instance, even in the August dress-down month, the trading floor employees were in semi-casual whereas middle/back office were properly casual clothes already. Kitchen chats seem to be more interesting and happening on our floor than on the trading floor. The idea is that middle/back office seemed more "happening", I suppose. But I might be slightly biased because I spend more time around the middle/back office than the front office.

It was very well organised. For someone considering a placement here, I think the relevant question is perhaps whether it was very good or too good. We had proper classroom training, defined rotations, a buddy (sometimes two) and a rotation manager, proper introductions on the first day, corporate social responsibility day (gardening basically), proper passes and emails and phonelines, organised lunches etc. Depending on whether you like these extra events or not, it would be either a clear boon or bane. It would also depend on your post-work/school/extracurricular commitments and whether you value a clear work-life divide and have your private time to yourself or whether you prefer to meld the two and use these events as a way to find people to hang out with. Either way, for the internship, it was not as packed as the internal work experience programme the firm runs for pre-university students (they had to use their lunchtime to get together with us, the interns, for some insight into university life and the internship programme). So how organised and how much is organised should be a factor but I don't think it is sufficiently serious to render it a make-or-break factor.

A lot. We had the formal financial products and services training from an external provider. We were also asked to finish 5-7 e-learning modules before we came (on topics such as bonds, financial markets, equities etc.). Then after we came in, we had e-learning on compliance, harassment policies, fire safety etc. Every other week, there'll be lunch&learn sessions which typically introduces a desk and what they do. There was also a special powerpoint training (which took an entire day) by an external provider for our end-of-rotation presentations. Finally, there was also a Bloomberg excursion to the headquarters to properly learn how to use the Bloomberg terminal.

While job cuts and/or losses have been announced this year across most banks such as HSBC, Llyods, RBS etc, MUSI has not seem to have made any formal public announcement as to its profits or possible redundancy plans. Because MUSI has a larger presence in the Asian markets (since it is Japanese to begin with), it is likely to be better buoyed by growth in Asia than other similar organisations. Experienced hires seem to be flowing in every few weeks so my guess is future employment prospects are quite positive.

Yes. Those with Bloomberg do have an intern-only group. Otherwise, 5 weeks or so into the internship, our intern class have been quite active on emails. Some choose to go for post-work friday drinks. Next week, HR has also organised an intern bowling night social that is completely geared towards socialising. There are also intern events where interaction will occur out of necessity - like the corporate social events with the rest of the firm or a marathon run. One experienced intern also organised an intern rugby team for an inter-bank tournament.

Moorgate. It's expensive.

I return to do my non-internship work at night, so I'm not sure about this.

Legal department had a bowling night and there will be a quiz night (though that is scheduled after I leave). There was also a house party organised by someone from Legal some time ago. I've only been in Compliance for two weeks but I just recently went for lunch with them.