Intern Review

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time on my internship. While the hours are long, and there are certainly peaks and troughs, the diversity of the work keeps you on your toes and the people that I worked with made it interesting and manageable. The exposure is unique as well, in that you are dealing with multinational corporations that you see in the headlines!

There was a large amount of guidance given, which is naturally part of the industry; however, what was more useful, and more encouraging to see, was the willingness of the people around you to help out with little things that cropped up now and then. This level of approachability was one of the defining features of the internship.

I was kept very busy on a daily basis; however, rather than this being draining, it filled up the time nicely thanks to the work being generally interesting and occasionally thought-provoking. The people make the workload bearable in the end, as those in the two metres or so surrounding you are who you end up spending the majority of your working week with.

It was a ramp of responsibility, starting out with little to no responsibility and constant oversight to eventually being trusted to work independently on projects by the end of the internship. I felt that this was appropriate as we were exposed to more and more ideas and approaches, the idea being that once you were shown how to do something once then you ought to be able to do it yourself from then after.

The skills that I developed will not help me directly in my degree, however the time management and ability to work under pressure aspects of it certainly will. Looking forward, then the hard skills will also help in the finance industry, as will the knowledge of how and where to source documents/ how to effectively use the systems and people around you.

The general atmosphere was relatively positive, given the circumstances surrounding Brexit and the impact that it had on the industry as a whole; there was a drive that filtered down from the senior management to create a strong pipeline and "reset" in a way. People were keen to see where the next few months would lead them

Again, the Brexit vote complicated proceedings; having spoken to a few of the other analysts it appears as if their internships were much more structured than ours, owing to the stronger and longer-lasting pipeline that they had compared to us. Nonetheless, it was interesting to be exposed to a broader set of deals and develop skills in our sped of learning

There was very high investment; from the teach-ins run by various people in the bank nearly every week, to the seminar series organised with high-profile individuals, UBS put a lot of thought, time and money into organising sessions designed to improve us as employees. On top of this was a very dense training week, which highlighted the extent to which the company was invested in us as individuals

Around the office it was expensive; a beer would cost £5-6 as of a Friday evening, and high competition meant that lunch was pretty fixed at around £7-8. Staying late meant that a cab home as well as dinner were provided free of charge, so this helped to offset a lot of the costs.

Shoreditch is very close by