Intern in FX Trading Review

I really enjoyed my 10 week internship. I enjoyed having some real projects to work with colleagues on, particularly as the department was quite busy over the summer with several significant projects with fairly short-term deadlines. Alongside this, it was great fun to shadow a range of colleagues across different teams. Finally, everyone working there was helpful and there was a good atmosphere between the team.

My supervisors, and other colleagues, definitely helped provide me with interesting projects, helped guide me with my tasks and explained everything, which was good. Obviously it's quite a busy team with lots going on, so it was nice of them to give up quite a bit of their time to help an intern.

Fairly busy, I had several longer-term projects which I worked on for at least a couple of weeks which meant I could usually get on with these, but in the meantime I had a variety of smaller tasks and governance meetings to attend and record. Finally, I spent quite a bit of my other time shadowing people and having concepts explained to me both in FX trading and other areas of the Financial Markets floor. Everyone was nice and helpful so so were happy to chat about work when I had gaps between tasks.

I developed practical skills which should be useful in my future career. These include a functioning understanding of R and the ability to analyse data and produce useful management information using the programme. Besides R and Excel skills, the main bonuses of my work was developing my understanding of the Foreign Exchange world and how Lloyds helps its clients engage in FX hedging and execution through multiple distribution channels.

I think the office had a good atmosphere. As it was part of the bank's front office, it always seemed fairly busy with a large number of colleagues dealing with the sale and trading of thousands of financial contracts to/on behalf of Lloyds' clients. All those around my row in the office were very nice and were all entertaining whilst working seriously on their job, which made it a nice place to be around.

We had an induction day at the start but no sort of formal classroom training following that, which was fairly good as it meant you could spend more time on the floor picking up on how everything there actually operates. Therefore most of my training and development came from my day to day experiences, shadowing and work, including several external product introductions which colleagues passed on to me.

I was offered a place on the graduate scheme to start in autumn next year, so am keen to go back to work for them after my final year at uni. Currently waiting for everything formal on that front, but hopefully should be starting the first of four rotations in the second half of next year.

I went out for several drinks with my colleagues and their friends, which was nice to get to know everyone a bit better outside of the office environment. We also had a team meal which was very nice, around half way through my summer there. There wasn't really anything organised by Lloyds to get all of the interns together, which could have been a nice way to get to meet your potential graduate intake, although some interns themselves organised a few open events.

Lloyds provided a large number of interns with accomodation if they didn't live in the same town as the office. We each got a pretty nice en-suite SOAS student room at Paul Robeson house near Kings Cross, which made for a nice 35 minute walk/10 minute cycle into the Gresham Street in the morning. This really helped with the cost of living as meant a large saving on peak time train tickets every day.

My internship and accommodation were both in London, so obviously there was a lot of options available. The office itself was right next to St Pauls, so in a nice part of the city and very close to the river etc. The city also definitely gets more lively in the evening than some of London's other financial areas, which was a positive. Most places are quite expensive though.