Penultimate Year Intern Review

I really enjoyed working at the Bank of England for a number of different reasons. Firstly, I found all my colleagues supportive and friendly. On top of this, the work life balance was perfect. Lastly, the location of the office - in the heart of London was definitely a welcomed change.

I think the project that my team assigned me was genuinely an area that the Bank of England wants/wanted to develop. This being said, I would have liked more integration with the team. Particularly, I would have like to sit-in on more policy discussions. However, being an intern I am not sure if that would be realistically feasible.

My team helped me over come the steep learning curve, and they provided us with many one on one, or small group training sessions. They were particularly good at doing this for more abstract or technical concepts like MREL. I would have liked more of a steer with respect to my final deliverable. Here, I felt like there was lots of room for ownership but equally there was not a defined deliverable.

My work load varied heavily on a day to day basis. The first few weeks of the internship I was relatively free - working typically 9-5 and still having time to discuss ideas and concepts with colleagues. However in the later 3 weeks the work load was quite heavy. There were some days where we had 10/11 hours of work.

There was lots of responsibility given to me. The team treated me like a full time employee with full autonomy over how I structured by day. I really enjoyed the responsibility I had. I did not expect I would have this much responsibility, especially given the sensitive nature of the information handled.

On the internship, I developed and honed my analytically skills, and equally my work area skills. By this I mean, I learnt a lot about corporate culture and the similarities between university and the differences to university. I would have liked there to have been a greater transfer of skills from the job back to university.

The general atmosphere was/is vibrant there is a great deal of things different members of the team are working on and this in itself helps to keep the place vibrant. Beyond this there is a great deal of nationalities represented within the office. This means that there is also a vibrancy in backgrounds which helps with the atmosphere.

The internship programme was well organised. It started with an induction event, which mostly covered security and technology. Then there were a few intern networking events. These were useful for integration purposes. This all being said I would have liked more interaction prior to the start date. I would have also liked more information regarding the application stage.

They invested heavily in interns. In terms of training I was thoroughly impressed by the time staff put into training us, and their care for our success. There is also a significant online data base where we can choose to learn more about the bank or learn more specific skills.

I would be very compelled to come back and work at the Bank of England - the only point here is that comparatively the wage is quite a bit below industry level. But then again, the hours are good. And the firm is in the public sector, but a better financial package would be welcomed.

There was a decent social scene, I would have liked more arranged events.

Central London is notoriously expensively. Post work socials were quite pricy.

London has a decent nightlife scene, but it is notoriously costly.

There were not that many opportunities to get involved in activities outside of work.