ICS - Sales Insights Intern Review

The insight was an amazing experience - everyone was very friendly and enthusiastic and there was a great atmosphere. They didn't expect you to know anything about finance and it was all about helping you understand the company and finance in general. I would definitely recommend it especially for people who don't study economics or similar degrees.

The firm seemed to genuinely like all of us, and want us to work there. They really seemed to want us to succeed and they helped prepare us to do that by giving talks such as 'how to succeed in assessment centres'. Even senior staff were very willing to give up time for us.

Everyone was very vocal about wanting us to ask questions and I never felt like I was asking something silly or obvious. They helped us out on tasks and explained things very clearly and were very willing to help. I was never set a task that seemed impossible and they were always on hand to help.

I think the skills and information will help me hugely in my career, but aren't particularly relevant to my degree because I study maths. But I will be in a much better position to do job applications after the spring insights program.

There was a lot of structure - all the talks and panels were organised for us and there were very smooth transitions between them. Everything ran on time. But I would say that there was sometimes too much time allocated to the lunch breaks.

The atmosphere was very positive and not competitive. All the other students were very friendly and many had very little specialist knowledge like me. The staff ensured that there was a very pleasant atmosphere all the time - it was a little less formal than I imagine many places can be which was nice.

They had several talks on how to succeed in a professional senese which were really useful. They also had a lot of informative talks about finance in general which was hugely useful training for me since I knew very little beforehand. So I felt a huge willingness to invest time and resources into helping me develop and understand the business and industry.

I had the opportunity to talk to lots of different people who did lots of different jobs and I gained a good overview of what lots of the different roles entail. Every speaker that we had also gave a background of their career path and talked about what they did day to day so I heard lots of different and varied accounts.

The company culture was clear from the start and through the whole of the week. The staff all seem to really believe in the culture so it was great to see and we heard lots about the culture from lots of different people. It seems to be a really great place to work where they value individuals and integrity.

It was very valuable. It helped me decide on a few areas of the business that are likely to be well suited to me, and I felt increasingly confident about those as the week went on, so I now have a much better idea about where I should apply to for summer internships and jobs. It also made me confident that an investment bank is right for me.

I was put into a nice hotel close to the headquarters so that I could walk to work each day. On top of that they paid for my travel both before and after the insight week. We also received breakfast and lunch every day, although it was often not as much food as lots of people were used to having. So my only expense was food each evening.

There was lots of time allocated to networking with various different groups of people. It was usually fairly informal and there were plenty of people so you could always talk to someone at around five on one at the most. Some more structured networking would have been good. It was really nice to meet the graduates who had been through the same program.

We had lots of opportunity to talk to all the employees so it was easy to ask about what they do outside of work. They were all very willing to answer any questions even if it didn't directly relate to finance which was nice. Lots of them seem to have very interesting hobbies and a much better work life balance than I was expecting.