Finance Summer Intern Review

Enjoyed it to a large extent due to: 1) High exposure to the bank via town hall meetings, team meetings and through setting up my own catch ups with VP's and Directors from many different areas of the bank. 2) Chance to utilise my Excel skills and learn many more whilst on the internship. I made processes more efficient and this was appreciated by my team. 3) Chance to network with my intern colleagues and graduates.

1) In my team, I felt isolated in some parts of the internship and was not integrated so well for the first 3-4 weeks. However, through my own initiative to request shadowing sessions and ask questions, I felt more part of the team and felt my contributions were being valued and noticed.

I was being given good attention my line manager. She put a lot of time into going through reviews of my work and giving feedback. However, there were times when I felt my views were disrespected and that certain feedback was being imposed on me rather than trying to come to a collaborative solution. This mostly happened in my first few weeks—the latter part of the internship was much more collaborative and less points of contention.

Mon-Tues: Less busy. Mostly emailing and meetings/relationship management plus checks on previous Excel files. Wed-Fri: Busy with both work tasks, group events and networking catch ups with people around the bank. I presented a large amount of my material to the line manager or other colleagues on Wed-Fri.

In the first 3 weeks, not much responsibility was given to me i.e. the team was busy on work in progress whereas I was working on my own isolated projects. However, I always proactively asked if I could help out or do extra work and strived to go beyond what my objectives stated on the sheet. In the last 5 weeks of the internship, I did much more responsible work, which contributed to helping the team achieve their goals thanks to establishing my credibility in the first 3 weeks.

The Excel and Presentation skills I learnt will be highly useful to me when I do another role either at Barclays or elsewhere. The training I received was excellent in teaching me the Barclays culture and the contemporary compliance and Risk policies.

The new/well-maintained building gave a good feel to working here. The atmosphere depended on the team we were in and the time of year/week we were at: month end was always busy in the reporting functions. Trading floors were busy every day. However, across all teams/floors I came across, there were places to relax and socialise with colleagues but at the desk, everyone kept busy with the work.

Very organised but too rigid. There was a plan A i.e. focus on work objectives only but very little leniency was shown in the first few weeks. After requesting a few times, and scheduling catch ups with people around the bank, the day was more flexible and filled with variety. It would be better in future if internships were rotational between teams instead of sitting in one team for 9 weeks. From an employee motivation point of view, it would be best to accommodate preferences and even ask in the initial set-up stage if there is one particular team we don't want to do.

Standard of training is excellent. The people here are very approachable oi.e. if I wanted to catch up for a coffee with someone I didn't know (but heard about through a mutual contact), I could send an email and they would invest their time in talking to me.

Very appealing in certain divisions/teams depending on what your skills are suited towards or the people you like to work with.I recommend any aspiring accountant to apply for the Finance division here.

Yes.

High

Good

Cricket with Barclays. Citizenship challenges.