Summer Associate Review

Great working hours and pull placement allowed to see different teams and projects and have a comprehensive understanding of what it is to work in banking. Firstly, the amount of projects that interns were offered gave pretty good understanding of day-to-day responsibilities of a full-time analyst / associate. Secondly, interns had a good level of independence and received enough coaching.

Almost all of the colleagues treated me really well. Firstly, they helped me with the day-to-day responsibilities. Secondly, they provided enough coaching and mentorship. However, some people are focused only on their agenda: they intentionally underestimate the amount of workload, create a lot of unnecessary work for the team etc.

On all my projects except one, I was given enough coaching and the mix of independence and guidance was just right. Also I had a chance to meet many people from different teams, including senior management people (MDs) - I had a chance to ask all questions related to the daily responsibilities and hear their perspective on the career long-term and on how to become a better banker.

At first I thought that 9-to-10 rule would not be maintained, but after all it was maintained every day by all people I was working with. It allowed to be always focused on the task and to avoid unnecessary stress of competing on 'who leaves the last' with other analysts / associates. Also all teams set very generous deadlines and never pushed on delivering in the next hour.

The aspect could have been more equal to all interns: while some people were given a lot of responsibility and worked on important parts of the project, other had mostly presentation and secondary priority tasks. Also I almost never had the last word on even minor parts of my analysis, and senior colleagues insisted on doing the work their way even if the end task could be done both ways.

Over the course of my internship I had significantly improved my overall understanding of finance, improved my modelling skills, as well as acquired interpersonal soft skills. Also I had a valuable experience of working in the London office across an extremely diverse team, which will help me well beyond my study.

On the one hand, on the job training was good and sufficient. Interns received enough guidance from full-time A&As. On the other hand, all the companywide training (unfortunately, including almost entire first week of the internship) activities was complete waste of time: firstly, it was irrelevant for associate interns, secondly as the topics were either basic or from the different fields, secondly, interns had very low interaction with the lecturer as the lecture was always delivered to 200+ audience.

My fellow interns turned out to be extremely friendly people. We all supported each other throughout the course of internship and I felt no pressure and unnecessary competition. With this respect, the team building event on Friday over the first week was extremely helpful. It would be really beneficial to have more interim events, such as escape room or other team activities.

Given the fact that London has pretty high costs of living, HR could have provided more support to the interns with respect to housing. In fact, we received only limited amount of information regarding housing and were even not informed about housing opportunities in the affiliated houses, i.e. Claredale house that prioritise Bank of America interns.