Intern Review

I enjoyed my internship at Santander because I found a great atmosphere and I worked with friendly people. I learnt a lot on how to behave in a corporate environment. However, I think I would have enjoyed it more had I been given more challenging tasks. In general, I thought that what I was doing was not really testing me too much.

As I mentioned above, everyone was very friendly and at Santander they would go out of their way to help you and make you feel at home. Also, the people I worked with gave me very nice feedback and it seemed to me that most of them really appreciated my contributions.

I think it was a bit unfortunate the fact that my line manager was not based in the same location as me. We regularly kept in touch over the phone and met in person a few times, but it clearly isn't the same thing as having a manager there all the time. However, they were always responsive and helpful when I needed them.

It fluctuated quite a bit. There were some days when I would be really busy and I would have to work hard to make sure I'd meet my deadlines. In other days, however, I didn't have much going on and I would work slowly to make sure I didn't finish too soon and hence be left with nothing to keep me busy with.

I think this is the thing that didn't quite work in my internship. Clearly, as an intern, you can't expect to be running the show, but I was given only one truly challenging and important task. The rest was mostly trivial and I am not sure what impact it actually had on the way we do things here.

I really learnt a lot during my internship, including how to use better powerpoint and excel, which will definitely help me in my career. The most important skill, however, was networking: wherever you go, you will need to be able to develop meaningful relationship and network with as many people as possible. This was really important throughout my time at Santander and it will really help me in the future.

Very nice atmosphere, friendly people who would go out of their way to help you. Also, there were always charity events, food sale and so on, so it was a really nice environment. They also threw a party for a person who was leaving one day, we had pizza and cake and it was very nice. The atmosphere in the office is one of the best features of Santander

Overall, it was well structured, with on boarding and off boarding events, learning calls throughout the placement. I think my team sometimes wasn't sure of how I could support them and to keep me busy they would give me small tasks, which weren't great. It's well structured, but maybe some more work would have been good.

Learning calls, a lot of catch ups with different business areas, I travelled a lot as well and all expenses were reimbursed. I think they really care about interns and they want them to develop and be happy. There could still be some improvement and some more investment, especially a bit of support in the first few days would be great.

I am not sure as I haven't had a chat with my line manager yet, but I know they are happy with me and they would potentially like to keep me. As every bank at the moment, however, they certainly aren't increasing the size of the workforce, so the opportunities are somewhat limited.

Interns were placed in cohorts of 7/8 people based on their location and I really clicked with my team. We had to organise fundraising events and we raised a lot of money and it was good fun as well. We also usually went out for a drink after work, about once a week. The cohorts were a good idea for people to meet each other and keep in touch.

Not as expensive as London, but still I had to rent a place and it cost quite a bit

Milton Keynes is not great at all for social life.

Not many