Intern Review

The Change & Business Solutions Internship at RBS was interesting in that you get to work on various projects/ tasks in your 10 weeks here. You also have a lot of space to learn about other areas that you may be interested in, including attending solution design Hackathons.

Felt valued by colleagues as was asked to improve processes and was given responsibility of my own projects. Also often asked to help with other day to day tasks.

Support was given when needed. You will have a weekly 1:1 with your line manager where you will discuss your previous weeks work and learning. You also have the opportunity to ask for any learning needs you have and these will be met.

The internship hours are 9-5 with a 1 hour lunch break. The internship is well balanced and workload is not very heavy.

Given responsibility to carry out on project looking into specific areas within the department that need improving/changing. In this sense there is good level of responsibility to carry out your own work and research projects which you will need to deliver throughout the internship. Your work will not be carrying out menial tasks around colleagues work, rather you will have your own work set, usual 3-4 projects and have full responsibility to deliver them.

The skills you will learn on the internship are extremely useful both in terms of soft skills and also some analytical skills. In particular, carrying out projects which are your own responsibility and working within a corporate environment such as that at RBS to identify the information you need and who you need to speak to, what meetings you need to set up is a very useful skill for the real world that will help you begin to gain an understanding of the corporate world.

The atmosphere in my particular office was not amazing as in people often ate lunch at their desks and there is was not much of a lunch or social culture. But I know for a fact that this was more specific for my department and almost all other interns in my programme had a very social working environment. The environment instead outside of the department, within the organisation is quite nice, especially within the intern and gradate programmes, where you have lots of social events, networking lunches set up and fun events. However, within the office and the whole bank people are extremely friendly and helpful which is something quite special for a bank.

The internship was extremely well set up. We had a 2 day induction period with all internships across the UK in Edinburgh to start the placement off, we had opportunities to meet gradates in our specific programmes from the start, we each had graduate which was our 'buddy' for the internship which we had meetings with one every few weeks or when needed, we have 1:1 meetings with our managers and the work I was due to carry out was clearly laid out and well thought through even before the internship began, there are lots of social events for interns and spotlight learning sessions where you learn about different areas of the bank such as risk, banking, sustainability, etc.

I was able to attend or reach out to any learning I was interested in outside of my department. For example I was able to attend a two day intern and graduate Hackathon and gained an interest in Private Banking and was able to attend an afternoon of shadowing within that division as a way to learn more about it.

Future employment prospective are good for interns: most interns will be given the offer to join the Graduate scheme the following year (which is a 2 year graduate scheme with 3-4 rotations in various departments)

Since there were around 60 interns based up in Edinburgh, the social scene was really great. From the first 2 days induction you had the chance to just meet many of the other interns and this helped foster friendships. Throughout the internship too, various events were set up for the interns and within the second week we had a group whatsapp chat where we would organise things on a weekly basis for whomever could attend particularly on the weekend.

Edinburgh is not an expensive city, especially compared to London. Rent price is okay (however can get expensive if not organised ahead of time during August due to the Fringe). Traveling costs are good- with £60 pounds/month for travel card where you can travel anytime/anywhere around the city for that that month. Entertainment and eating out is also at a good price, especially around the University of Edinburgh area.

Nightlife was quite nice. There is quite a bit of choice for places to go and in addition to this interns often met up during the weekend. In addition over August the city really turns into a very fun and high energy atmosphere place with artists from the fringe everywhere on the streets.

Yes. There was football tournament organised for interns and graduates and weekly football game between interns organised.