Product Control Finance Review

I have very much enjoyed my internship and I am very glad that I did it. The struggle was the early mornings but this has nothing to do with Nomura! The scheme has been well organised and structured to help us get the most out of it and learn a lot.

I had a small team so it was a bit unusual but they were nice and friendly. They became more chatty towards the end. Other people in the firm were very willing to help and always willing to give me time and advice which made a big difference to my time.

At the start my manager was away so I had a slightly strange beginning. He was then quite busy so I wasn't given too much support in the first half of the internship. The second half has been much better with much more support and guidance which has been helpful.

For a lot of the time I had a small amount of work with long periods of not having a lot to do. This had a tendency to get quite boring. Around halfway I brought this up to HR and I started to get much more work which made the days more enjoyable.

Almost all of the tasks I completed were checked by my team before being sent out. This is very understandable most of the time as the work is important, but a lot of the time I am made to show my team any email before I send it which feels a little unnecessary.

The skills I have developed and training I have received will not help me with my degree in Economics at all really. They will, however, be very useful in other jobs. The excel training has been extremely helpful and will definitely be good to have in the future. Also learning skills like how to communicate in the workplace have been really valuable.

The office tended to have a relatively good atmosphere. Some of this was due to a lot of charity fundraising which always involved cake. The office has a terrace which did drinks on Thursday which was really nice, it was a great networking opportunity and often senior people in the department would host drinks up there.

The organisation of the internship was great. There were loads of talks scheduled throughout the 10 weeks which helped me learn about all the other areas of the bank that I wasn't in. There were also some intern social events which were a nice way to get to know all of the other interns.

We had 2 training days at the very beginning of the internship which were run by an external company and past that most of the training has just been of the desk. We had a couple of sessions on how to use excel and make professional presentations and also lots of talks on what different departments do.

The smaller size of the company when compared to other banks means that the grad scheme is very small which is not great. They only hire half of the interns. I have heard though that this small size means that you are given a lot of responsibility early on and you get good exposure to senior people.

I was very lucky to meet a good group of interns and we got on really well. We ended up going out together most Thursday and Friday nights and always having lunch together. I do not think this was necessarily the case with all of the interns, and the social scene more generally didn't seem the best.

Being located in the city of London, everything around the office was very expensive. Food in the office was also not subsidised so was also quite expensive. I lived at home so this was not an issue but socialising cost a lot as the drinks prices were very high almost everywhere.

There were lots of really nice bars and clubs around the area so we had a lot of options. There was also a bar attached to the bottom of the office which was on the river that was really nice for after work drinks. Often when we went out we would get ubers to clubs slightly away from the office.

I think that there were a couple of sports clubs that you maybe could have joined but they weren't really advertised. I didn't hear much about anyone getting involved in outside work activities. The only ones I did hear about were the occasional charity runs that you could take part in and I think there was a football tournament.