Risk Summer Analyst Review

I had a great time at Barclays. My team were incredibly welcoming and friendly to me, and they made the experience so much more enjoyable. The work was interesting and challenging. There were opportunities to socialise with the other interns and grads like a networking breakfast. It would have been nice to have sessions after work arranged for interns like drinks or dinners, but this is probably asking for too much, and so I consider it a very minor complaint.

As I said above, my team made me feel very welcome. They all had lunch together most days and got drinks on Fridays and they invited me to all of these. The MD If I ever needed anything explained they would always have time for me. If I had one complaint I would say sometimes people who I emailed in the wider bank would not respond to me - but I imagine this is quite a common occurrence across all businesses, as there are more important things to be done that chat to interns all day.

Barclays assigns three people to help you - a buddy, a mentor and a manager. The buddy and mentor are useful for getting insights into different areas of the bank. My manager was very helpful and gave me help whenever I needed it. I also got frequent support and guidance from the people around me. I have only positive things to say here.

My manager set me work and I fed back to her regularly on what I had done and what I should do next. This work was directly related to the work that the team was doing. On top of the work my manager set there were regular insight sessions given by senior members of the bank, discussing their career history and what their function does. Aside from this I arranged many one to one meetings with different people within the bank to learn more about areas outside of my work. My friends at American investment banks were pushed harder than I was, but I'm not sure they'd say that was a good thing. My team were quite relaxed and I appreciated this.

The work I was given was serious work that would be submitted to audit and suchlike. We were allowed to email anyone within the company and given access to any data or resources that were necessary for our work. I'm not sure how much more responsibility an intern could be given really.

My work developed my technical skills and it was fun to learn a lot about a specific area. We were given lots of opportunities to learn about many different part of the bank, and all of the areas within Risk. I had programming training and the mandatory training you'd expect from an investment bank. My manager helped me with a lot of the specific aspects of my work. In general, the training at Barclays is excellent.

I was not in a market facing role and so we did not have the intensity and noise you might expect of an investment bank. This is not to say my office was quiet -the teams around me were very sociable and there was a relaxed atmosphere almost all the time. I really appreciated this.

There was always something to do. Insight sessions organized by HR covered most areas of Risk and were evenly spaced out throughout the 9 weeks I was there. Every week I would have a catch up session with my manager, although I spoke to her much more frequently than this making them sometimes redundant. I can't think of anything that struck me as badly organized.

Barclays gives great training and I feel very prepared to start a graduate scheme role. I think it will take the interns a long time to earn Barclays back the amount of money and time they have invested in us frankly. A lot of the people on the graduate scheme I spoke to were going straight into AVP roles.

As I mentioned above, all of the graduates I spoke to were going into AVP roles within the company and seemed very happy with Barclays. There is scope to move around between divisions if that's what you want to do. In general, Barclays is a very respected employer and a great name to have on your CV if you wanted to work for a different company.

My team would go for lunch and drinks together. How sociable the interns are is very dependent on the interns themselves. I socialized quite often with many of the interns, however I think some people can be excessively focused on their work and getting a graduate offer. I had one intern say they didn't want to talk too much to their team "in case they said something bad". I think this is a sad attitude to have and I wish more interns would relax a little, in general.

My family live on the commuter belt so I decided to commute into London rather than rent there. I would not recommend doing this in hindsight. You save a lot of money not renting in London, but train tickets are still expensive, and commuting was at times almost intolerable. This summer has been particularly hot, and with a lot of trains being cancelled this made getting home really quite awful. One particular journey home the carriage was absolutely crammed and I had to stand for half an hour while it was 32 degrees outside. I can remember feeling the sweat dripping down my back at quite a terrifying rate. Awful. Think carefully about whether you want to commute.

The night life in London is great of course, if expensive. As I had to commute home I never really went wild, but I still went to my fair share of pubs and I know lots of other interns who had a great time in London. Living at home had some benefits - on the weekends I got to see my school friends and we went to the pub and for dinners often as you might expect.

I'm not really sure what this question is asking, so perhaps I was not getting involved in activities then? Many interns organized things like hackathons and charity events and I attended a couple of these. My general after work activities involved netflix, youtube, pub and video games, and I have no complaints about this.