Student Review

I thoroughly enjoyed the insight it was a really good programme and a great three days. I liked the variety of the activities we undertook and I learnt so many different facets of the bank life. It really was fascinating and a great insight into banking. As well as this it was hugely enjoyable and the activities which were planned were as fun as they educational and interesting. I really really liked it, more than the other Banking work experience programme I did in February.

I felt relatively valued by Nomura. Nomura repeatedly told us how impressive we had been to make a successful application which was a nice touch. Everyone in the firm was nice and welcoming and answered all questions I had quickly and nicely. People were much nicer than I had expected, especially after reading Liar's Poker and The Big Short by Michael Lewis, where depictions of bankers are not so nice.

Good guidance. Most of the programmes were really well explained. The trading simulation games were particularly well explained, especially considering how complicated they were. There were however a few activities and times during the Work Experience scheme where I was unsure what we were meant to be doing and did feel a bit misguided, but they were relatively few and far between.

The skills I developed and information I received helped me hugely during the work experience week for all the later activities. As I am still in Sixth Form and not yet at University I can not say how they help my degree. However as I am pretty set on applying for economics at university, which has many overlapping facets with investment banking skills, I am sure the skills will come in handy. I am hoping to work as a banker in the future anyway and the skills themselves were very helpful/

Very very well structured. The people working with us all knew exactly where they were meant to be and when. By giving us the structure on the first day, us (the participants) also knew the structure throughout. It was clear all the events were meticulously thought through and planned and fit into the different days like a jigsaw puzzle. The structure was really good in my opinion, and in fact I could not have thought of any possible improvements.

The atmosphere was good. All the workers were really open and nice to me all the time. My co participants on the scheme were nice also. However it did at times feel like a competitive atmosphere where people were very quick to blow their own trumpets and I feel like some of the other participants were a bit cocky at times. It did feel abit cut throat sometimes and I didnt want to become friends with many of the people after the scheme, altough maybe that is due to me being pretty closed and not the most welcoming to new friends.

The definitely invested a lot. Apart from the time put in by many senior workers to come and advise, help and teach us, the physical materials given to us to work with were good aswell. I learnt a lot from the experience of interviewing, trading, speaking publicly and many others. I really felt like Nomura did care about me and treated us like assets for the future and all the technology we got to use was good too.

I think they did this as much as they could. While it is obviously impossible to portray a whole life in one career over three short days, the programme was really pakced with activities showing us what life in each sector was like meetings and work wise, which allowed me to formulate what a full time role was like. Certainly by the tireness I felt on coming home each day I understood the exhaustion bankers must feel.

Difficult to answer. I don't feel I understood the company culture much because maybe as such a large bank its hard to have a coherent identity. People were slightly contradicting as [This section of the comment has been removed by a member of the RateMyPlacement Team because it did not meet our site terms and conditions] told us many times that Nomura was based on kindness and gratitude but with many others they gave across a more ruthless tone of doing whatever needs to be done to win on the trading floor

Very valuable. Although I already had the idea of being a banker in my head this week crystallised my vision. BY learning about different divisions with in the bank, I now feel I know my hopeful career path clearer now and definitely feel like I want to become an Investment Banker working with Mergers and Acquisitions or a Researcher on the trading floor helping the traders out.

I think being paid for such a thing where we did not actually do any work contributing to Nomura's business, only to our own brainpower and knowledge, would be very silly

Yes many and they were all really good.

The networking events over lunch were good. Although I feel as teenagers we are too young to properly network (a good example of this is the fact very few of us had linkedin)the lunchtime networking sessions were just a cool way to meet and chat to lots of people at the firm. I feel the end of week networking event was good but inviting the parents was a move I didn't really like as it made it a bit awkward for many of the kids

No. This never came up in any activiteis. I dont think this is a big deal and never even thought about it before this question. I reckon bankers work so hard so many hours that they have little free time anyway but I guess learning more about what peopledo wouldn't be a bad thing. However apersons happy has not much to do with the company they work for so it would probably be a bit irrelevant.

Yes. All day every day. I really really enjoyed it and learned so much from it. I really would like to thank everyone at Nomura who extended their services as in my opinion the scheme was almost perfect. I would recommend it to everyone everywhere, although it is so difficult to get in that maybe recommending it to so many people, thus making it even harder to get in, is not the best idea.