Wealth Management Intern Review

Overall, the internship was ok, although I expected to gain a lot more from it. I interned in Wealth Management and was assigned to an area that I didn't particularly enjoy - I know a lot of interns felt this as well. The work wasn't very stretching at all and I learnt very few new technical skills.

Relatively valued - my immediate team were very encouraging with the feedback provided to me. That said, at one point I was told 'you will do no actual work as an intern', which I felt was quite disheartening as I wanted to get a good feel for what the day-to-day role was like and upskill myself.

My manager was very supportive of me. She knew a lot of people from across the business and was more than happy to set up meetings and shadowing with them. I always felt like I could talk to her and she made it very clear that I didn't have to involve myself in work I didn't want to do.

The role I had was client facing, but I had no clients (because I was an intern), so the majority of my time was spent trying to find adhoc tasks to complete to try and be helpful. There were market updates I went to every day to fill my diary, but the reality of it is that I spent a lot of time being bored.

Very little responsibility, as mentioned above. To an extent, this is the nature of the business, but at the same time, I feel like it could have been improved through a better structured internship with opportunities to rotate into teams where you could have more of an impact on the work.

I come from an economics background, so not at all. I learnt very few hard technical skills and also feel like I wasn't really put in enough difficult situations for my soft skills to develop more. Within the role I was in, the challenge from the work seemed to come from the time management aspect of it - there was not much need to know any economic theory/ have much of an understanding of financial markets.

Decent atmosphere, but very corporate, as expected. Never went for drinks with colleagues but were all open for a bit of chat at the desk etc.

Quite well organised. We were given opportunities to meet with key business individuals and get exposure to senior management across the internship. We also had a D/ MD initiative to meet with 4 directors/ managing directors, which gave us some direction. Could have done with a rotation - 9 weeks is a long time to stay in one team and not do much.

Not very much at the intern level, but they pay for CFA and exams on the grad shceme.

Quite appealing - Barclays is a great firm and very qell established. The Wealth Management scheme is not as intense as the Private Bank scheme (they are part of the investment bank, Wealth is part of Barclays UK) and you a rotation across Barclaycard/ Corporate/ Business Banking, which may be useful or not, depending on how you look at it.

Yes, there were 14 of us and I'd say about 10 were keen to get socialising. We went for drinks, went bowling and had dinner a few times. It's what you make of it though, some people in Business Banking and other divisions got very close and hung out all the time, for example.

London is quite expensive, but I went to University College London and so was very much used to it. £5 a pint £6 on lunch most days if you don't want to make your own Rent £700 a month Commuting £100 a month But there is a lot of free stuff to do as well.

Canary Wharf is a decent place to go for drinks in an evening and then you have the whole of London to play with if you fancy it. That said, the place is a bit soulless. It's London, you can make as much or as little of it as you want really.

Not really, we had 1 summer party, but there didn't seem to be much of a sports/ activities culture.