Summer Intern Review

Really enjoyed the internship overall and felt it was really well structured. From the induction week till the final event you could tell that it was carefully planned to make it enjoyable! It helped that our division had a fairly small number of interns and so we all got on quite well. I heard his was a little different in the larger divisions.

The culture at the firm was amazing. People were really happy to talk to interns and there seemed to be a fairly flat hierarchy meaning you genuinely could go up to talk to anyone. My team was really welcoming too from day 1 which helped make the experience even more enjoyable.

My manager was really helpful. Couldn’t have asked for anything better; he went out of his way to help me with mentoring and not just work-related matters but helped me develop skills for my CV etc which really made me feel valued. He also put time aside regularly for me despite being busy.

I think it is very much dependent on how you go about the day. I was given a few projects by the team and then helped with ad-hoc daily tasks which did keep me busy. Some days were busier than others but overall I used down time to meet new people which meant I didn’t get bored.

I was really lucky to be given a lot of responsibility from Day 1. At one point I was managing one of the projects the team had going on which really was something that made me feel truly valued. They also weren’t tasks created for me rather tasks the team had to get done.

Definitely useful and this was aided by the fact that my manager went out of his way to help develop me as a person.

Really quite an interesting atmosphere. There were times when the office was a bit more quiet notably the mornings but overall it was a fairly relaxed atmosphere.

Really well set up overall. We had regular senior leader sessions set up by HR and the division then set up various other social events which really helped us get to know different teams within the division. This was useful as we were all interning in different teams so it gave us a solid knowledge base of different teams.

There was personal development training on the first few days mainly around team-building and collaborative tasks which was quite interesting.

Barclays do tend to convert a lot of their interns as they see it as a feeder to the graduate programme. I’d really love to join the firm as I think they do seem to invest a lot more in grads and interns than other places. I have interned at some other big bulge brackets and I can definitely say the Barclays experience was significantly better despite the lower compensation.

We were a small division in terms of interns which meant we got together regularly for dinner/Friday drinks. I know this was not the case for some of the larger divisions where it was more difficult to organise these sorts of events.

Barclays are located in Canary Wharf. Inevitably going out was expensive as a result.

Central London wasn’t far (20minute tune ride). Not a huge amount in Canary Wharf though.

You could get involved in sports clubs or other workstreams though these weren’t really actively promoted. It was very much down to you.