Wealth Management Summer Analyst Review

I have very much enjoyed my internship at Barclays this summer. I have found the internship engaging, interesting, and incredibly helpful to my development. I have regularly been busy, but not too busy, and as such the nine weeks have flown by - always a good sign if you ask me.

Throughout the internship here at Barclays I have been given real responsibility on 3 major projects, often working towards a tight deadline and being part of the final presentation back to senior management. As a result I have felt enormously valued by my colleagues who have treated me like a regular employee. This has been hugely beneficial to my development.

As soon as I started at Barclays the support structure and focus on ongoing development became tangible. My line manager has made time to catch up with me every week, offering constructive feedback and advice at every available opportunity. This is incredibly attractive to me, as I aim to launch a career in the banking sector, as I am confident the effort that goes into developing employees here at Barclays is up there with the very best.

During the first couple of weeks of the internship I found work fairly slow, and did a few online training modules to pass the time. However, once people started to get to know me a little better, I was often relied upon for tasks. As a result I have been busy pretty much every day since then, rarely finding myself with nothing to do. This said, I never had to work awful hours as, if you keep on top of the work, you're never being overly stretched.

On each of the three main projects I worked on I felt that I was given real responsibility from the outset. Tasks I was asked to complete were normally to tight deadlines and. if I had not done them, the team would have fallen behind. This was very pleasing, as it meant I felt like my work was of genuine value to the team, who weren't just giving me pointless tasks to fill my time!

I have already finished my degree (in History), so that is a non-starter. However, going forward, the skills I have learned here will be enormously helpful as I start a career in banking. The internship has given me incredible exposure to the financial markets and the huge variety of processes that underpin wealth management, and banking in general.

The atmosphere in the office was always a good one, even though because it has been the summer there have often been a fair few empty desks (with people going on holiday). However, people are always very friendly and happy to have a chat if you're interested in finding out what they do on a day to day basis. As well as this, Barclays have recently implemented a fruit drop scheme and got a new coffee machine for each floor, so everyone's been in a cracking mood as a result.

The internship scheme at Barclays has been reasonably well organized. While each intern is placed within a specific team for the duration of the nine weeks (I have been in the Business Management side of things), HR organized weekly talks from other areas of the business so everyone could get an insight into what the Bank has to offer across the board. My only criticism would be that HR themselves are sometimes a little slow to fully answer your questions, and have thus far not been particularly clear on the format the graduate scheme will take, should we secure a place on it.

I feel as though the company have invested not just a lot of money in intern development, but also, within each team allocated an intern, a huge amount of time has been invested in making us feel valued, and in helping us to develop the skills we need to become better employees. As a result, myself and all the other interns in Wealth Management that I've spoken to have said they feel a lot of effort has been put in by Barclays to train us up over the nine week period - the feel you get is that they want everyone to get the grad job at the end, it is not a hostile, overly-competitive atmosphere.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at Barclays, and as such would very much like to continues my employment at the Bank via the graduate scheme. This is reinforced by the fact that the rotational grad scheme gives grads the chance to rotate across three totally different teams in order to give us exposure to as many different things as possible, and provide us with a breadth of skills going forward - an appealing prospect as one tried to find one's way in a career in the financial sector.

Over the course of the nine weeks I've spent at Barclays, there have been at least 4/5 big events put on which I've been invited to (and attended) which are always really nice occasions as it's all free and everything is very professionally organized. On top of this, all the interns have met up after work every week on either Thursday or Friday for drinks, which has been a great way to keep in touch despite working on different teams during the day.

The office is in Canary Wharf which is sadly quite an expensive place to socialize (although nowhere in London is going to be cheap!) I also rented a room in a flatshare in Hammersmith which was £700 a month (not too bad for London), although the commute was a good 45 minutes which did get quite tedious by the third or fourth week.

The nightlife in Canary Wharf is nothing too special, but no one really tried to go out here - it's more just a case of a few drinks after work on a Thursday or Friday. When we wanted to go out, it was better to head into the city center - obviously in London there's hundreds of places to go so you're spoiled for choice really.

Over the course of my nine weeks I didn't manage to get involved in a whole lot of activities outside of work - things like work football leagues only really kick in later in the year (not over summer). This said, I did manage to get involved in a citizenship scheme Barclays ran which helped renovate a run-down playground in Tower Hamlets, and I know a few other interns were asked along to the JP Morgan charity run.