Technology Summer Intern in Risk Analytics Review

I am enjoying my internship quite a lot to be very honest. Firstly, its a brand new experience, so everything is quite new and fresh and interesting comparing to my experiences at school. Secondly, I really like the people here, I met great many great other interns and we hang out a lot, the colleagues in my team are very good at their job but also very friendly and caring for me. So I never feel like not coming to work when I wake up early in the morning, which is amazing.

My colleagues didn't know about my background at all before I arrived at my desk, but they certainly have been trying to assign me work that are both feasible and challenging enough for me. Its great that they are trying to get me involved in the team's daily activities. They are assigning me tasks that would actually help make a difference and it feels great.

The support that I received is amazing, seriously amazing. Its amazing that my line managers care so much about my personal development, and my personal opinions. It feels great. I feel that they are really trying to make me learn and get a lot of knowledge out of this experience, instead just trying to make me do something for 2 months and not really learn anything. My two line managers has been very very friendly and supportive in pretty much everything, its great.

I think that's a problem a lot of big companies faces, especially investment banks. I really hasn't been very busy at all, and sometimes I can be quite bored. Now let me explain why. When a new joiner joins a team, they need to learn a lot, whether through reading books, or reading at other sort of information sources. That part is not quite so enjoyable and boring. Besides that, there are a lot of hassles about requesting for access to pretty much everything, and those kind of things take a long time. Which means for the first two weeks on my desk, I been either doing compulsory compliance trainings, or waiting for my request for a piece of software/file access to be approved, which does leave me quite bored at times. But I believe that is what you face in every highly regulated environment such as investment banks, not UBS's problem as much.

More than I expected, to be honest. They are making me contribute to their current project, which is a huge and important project, and I feel great being a part of it. I also got assigned some small independent task that are both technically challenging and will make a difference, which is great as well. So in general, I feel I do get given a fair amount of responsibility given my background and ability.

I think although I'm only half way through the internship, I have already learnt a great deal of things. One of the most important things I learnt is about working in a team with people from different background in a professional environment. It's nothing like if you do a project with other interns, I am in a team with a lot of very professional people that has been in this industry for many many years, so I definitely learnt a lot from working with them. Other than that, I certainly expanded my technical knowledge, as well as applying my current knowledge in a work environment. So I general I think I learnt a lot already and I will definitely expect to learn a lot more.

The general atmosphere is very relaxing, maybe its because its a very back office role (technology). Everyone is very friendly and pretty chill about everything, which something that I really do enjoy. There is flexible working hours, you can talk to everyone quite easily, and everyone is very caring and interested in knowing about me as a new intern.

Definitely quite well organised, there are a lot of events, whether social events that help us to know either other interns, or knowing other people higher up in the bank, as well as talks and training that helped me to gain a greater insight into the bank and this industry in general. There are certainly things are not as well organised, like they could've set up everything for us before we come in so we don't have to wait a huge amount of time. In fact some people's things are setup already and some are not, which makes it fairly annoying.

The training was just soso. One of the training was excel, but that honestly is quite useless for a developer. But there are few good things, we could use Safari Queue freely, which is a great site for getting technical books, I already read quite a few. They also partner with Coursera and we can do 2 courses on that, which is also quite nice.

Its alright, but not brilliant. For example, the pay for the graduate is not great apparently. The work is boring sometimes while good at other times, some people may like it, and some people may not. The thing that really might stop people coming to the company might be that the equipment, I mean this by the machines they use, quite slow, very hard to use at times, especially for developers. The upside is the great people and culture I think, they really make this place quite enjoyable, also the atmosphere. There is good and bad.

There is a pretty good social scene, I connected with quite a few fellow interns, and developed quite a good relationship with many of them, especially with the ones on my floor. They do provide a decent amount of social events, which are quite nice, and in general its quite good, not amazing, but not bad surely.

Living, not sure, since I don't quite live around, I live with my parents and travel here everyday. I heard the price of renting is not high, but not low neither, I don't have the exact number on the top of my head, but it is not horrible for a central london accommodation. The socials are quite affordable actually, for London prices, ofc you can't really compare with other cities.

I don't really have a night life, not a big fan of clubbing or anything like that, so probably quite hard for me to comment on this question. But you know this area, quite central London, I'm sure there are a lot of good places to hang about around night time.

I actually can't think of any of the top of my head. I think someone even asked but they answered that there is not much of this kind of activities, but you can discuss that with the HR or people responsible individually I guess. I heard that there is a developer group that hosts quite a lot of events, so I will check that out.