Intern Review

I did not enjoy my internship. We were choosing preferences at the beginning and I was not allocated to any of my top choices. I tried to find out how the allocation process works but nobody made it clear to me. People on one of my teams never had time for me and were not very helpful.

I did not feel valued by my colleagues. On one of my teams, my manager literally never had time for me. I would keep putting 1 to 1 meetings with him in his calendar but he would keep cancelling it. I never got any meaningful work to do for my desks which made me feel bad.

My manager did not support me. He never seemed to have time for an intern and would always reschedule our meetings as his other meetings would overrun or essentially he always had something more important. I was patient and understanding but that did not help – I think he could not care less about me.

I was quite busy – I would get to work for 8 and stay until around 7-8 in the evening. It’s just a shame that work I was given did not make a difference to anyone. I do not know how they decided on the tasks assigned to me but they were of no use at all for anyone on my desk.

I was not given any responsibility at all. I would only do tasks that were meant to help me learn about what the desk does. Never got anything that would help the desk or contribute to some material for a client. I think I was unlucky, interns on different desks seemed to be getting a lot more responsibility.

The internship helped me learn more about markets and different products the banks offer. I found it useful since I am now studying Master’s in Finance. I spent a lot of time learning about fixed income products such as structured credit and bonds – very useful for my current degree and this is one thing I enjoyed about my internship.

Atmosphere was good – I was on a trading floor so it was quite loud but people were not shouting so it was all fine. However, because it was a summer internship, I expect it was quieter than other months of the year as some of the colleagues were on their annual leave.

I do not think it was very well organised. I only found out where I would be placed a few days before so I was not able to speak to my manager or colleagues before actually joining the desk. It also seemed like the people on the desk did not think of any work to give to me before I joined.

I think the company does care about training and development. Every week, we had a desk from equities come in and speak about what they do so we could find out not only what the desk we were placed on does but also what happens in the bank as a whole. However, these were mainly equity desks in which I was not so much interested in.

Not appealing – Deutsche Bank is not in the best position right now. They have fired a lot of people. They continue to do this. Management does not know how to turn the situation around. There were three restructuring plans in the last three years and it does not look like they caused any improvement in the performance of Sales and Trading.

I do not think there was a good social scene among my colleagues, and slightly better among fellow interns. The sales desk I was on never invited me anywhere, my trading desk invited me for a drink twice. Some of the interns were typical lads and it was not nice to be around them.

Very expensive – it was in the city. Food was expensive, drinks were expensive, clubs were expensive. I know we get paid quite well but you have to pay for accommodation too! And I had to save money for my masters course so I could not enjoy going out as often as I would have liked.

There were no opportunities to get involved in anything after work. I do not know why – probably cause nobody cared or could be asked after the long hours we had to work. If HR organised anything during work, the communication was really poor and they did not advertise other events that someone else may have organised.