Summer Intern, Software Engineer Review

Very good internship, I think the only reason it wasn't higher was purely due to the covid 19 pandemic not allowing people to work in offices. This made socializing a bit more difficulty but the overall experience was the same in my opinion. The work was challenging and fulfilling but I would have enjoyed having more time to completely polish all the code I developed. There were also many good seminars which were very educational.

I think Barclays does a good job valuing their employees, with that being said it was slightly hard for us as a team because there were five of us for a relatively small task. This left a smaller availability to stand out with our skills because splitting tasks left us with not as much work. It was also difficult at times due to resource constraints, but in the end I still think the work we did was appreciated.

My manager made time to attend every daily standup we did as a team, she also made an effort to ensure we were on the right track in our project. I have only been here for five weeks but I can very much tell she has many responsibilities which exceed her role as a manager but even with this she was making sure our internship was going as smoothly as possible. She made it good.

The first three weeks of my internship were significantly hindered by a lack of access to proper coding environments. It should be noted that this was due entirely to covid 19 and not Barclay's fault. I am in my fifth week out of six and there is still a person on my team who has been unable to code. While this wasn't the case for me this has definitely led to a decrease in productivity.

There was a very good balance of work and responsibility. We had to host meetings for permanent employees and attend seminars. We also did rounds of being the scrum leader for our agile team. This led to a good balance of work being distributed among my team. From there we each took jobs in our team to fulfill different goals. whether that be coding/feature based or presentation based. We also rotated these roles so that everyone got to try everything at least once.

My degree is Computing Science and what I was doing during this internship was coding and project management. I think in a vacuum this internship is less useful for my university career and -more importantly- very important in my computing career. Code development works very differently in a corporate environment and this internship has provided a lot of useful experience in the real world environment. So I guess in short it doesn't help all that much in my university career but that's not as important as the other latent benefits it provides.

We worked from home. While we tried to create a similar atmosphere via webex calls it was not the same without actually meeting people in person. That being said some of the employees of the Barclays office near me described it as a friendly environment. Development sounded like a cooperative team effort and a good environment overall. There was a good level of camaraderie among the employees and interns during the internship and a friendly atmosphere.

During the internship personal development is encouraged for every employee. We have access to pluralsight and other teaching resources which allow you to test and hone your skills. We are also encouraged to have many meetings with different departments and shadow permanent employees to gain an insight into how the company works as a whole. By the end you have to give back some knowledge in the form of a presentation where you can show how much you have learned.

As stated previously, the internship was purely virtual so there wasn't much room for actually socializing with my fellow employees. Although I do think I got to know my peers quite well without meeting them in person and managed to actually have some good chat with them. Keep in mind my situation isn't the norm given COVID 19 I would say Barclays handled it as best they could. With that in mind the vibe I got from working here was that people are friendly and quite social.

It depends whereabouts you are in Glasgow but it can be relatively cheap to quite expensive. All the parks are free and the same goes for walks but some hobbies will require money. The average pint in Glasgow is probably around four pounds thirty pence but some cheaper places will do them for three fifty. If you don't drink there are plenty of other activities like gyms (my membership is 130 a year). Overall it is possible to live cheap in Glasgow but you'll have to make some sacrifices.

I stay in Glasgow which is renowned for being one of the best cities for nightlife in Scotland. There are many pubs in my area which have different "themes" such as a local jazz bar I like. Sauchiehall street has several clubs leaving the average person spoiled for choice. Some areas of Glasgow are quite gentrified and allow for some fine dining experiences and well as craft beers. Or if you prefer simplicity there are plenty of university bars serving tennents on tap.