Summer Intern Review

I very much enjoyed my time here as I feel like I've managed to give some valuable contributions to my team despite the short length of the internship. At the same time, I've had a chance to get involved in many different activities which helped me meet a variety of interesting people and find out a lot about the bank. There was never too much pressure to produce something all the time, but the focus was mainly on the quality of the work and my understanding of the problems we were trying to solve.

I've always felt extremely valued by anyone, which is incredibly important when you've just joined and obviously don't know as much as people who have been working for longer. However sometimes I would have liked more responsibility and involvement in what my team does rather than my main project.

I was lucky to have an extremely supportive line manager who made me feel comfortable from day 1 and was always available to help me and answer my questions. He introduced me to a wide number of people and organised some informative one-to-one sessions during my first week and then regularly scheduled meetings throughout the internship to check on my progress and make sure I was enjoying the work. He gave me a lot of freedom in choosing how to implement my project and encouraged me to think creatively, but was also happy to give me more information and directions whenever I felt stuck.

Most days I had enough to do, as my project was fairly open-ended and so as I could always expand it and improve it after I completed the core part. However occasionally I felt like I would have liked to be given more tasks. In those situations I would usually keep myself busy by networking, going to talks, participating in other activities, which are always available.

I was given full responsibility on my project and was trusted to talk to fairly senior people about my findings and recommend solutions to some of the issues I had found.

I acquired better Excel skills, business knowledge and analytical skills that will definitely help me in a variety of contexts in the future, including perhaps my degree.

Very relaxed, people are very friendly and everyone enjoys their work, while also having a good work/life balance. There was always someone willing to help or spend some of their time to explain to me what they do and answer my questions.

Everything was carefully planned and, on my arrival to my desk, my account had been set up so I could start working straight away. Other interns, however, had a slower onboarding due to their managers not requesting their accounts in time. Everything else was also perfectly organised: the first week of training ran smoothly and was dense of interesting talks, training sessions, a volunteering activity with school students and a social event. HR also organised a weekly speakers series for all the interns and there was one every week for each division too.

There was a full week of training at the start and two weekly speaker series (one for all the interns, one specific to the division) throughout the whole internship. In addition to this, there was online training available and plenty of division-specific sessions we could take part in.

Very appealing, as it's a very stimulating and enjoyable environment to work in and there are plenty of opportunities to move around and work in exciting areas.

We went for drinks after work almost every week and would organise events to meet up, so pretty good.

Quite expensive, but being in London this is expected.

Really good, as, again, it's London.

There were several, like social events and volunteering.