Summer Associate Review

Enjoyable experience on the whole, plenty of opportunity to learn about different sectors, both within my division and in other divisions. Everyone was very friendly and willing to schedule meetings to tell me about their jobs, and give advice or refer me to people who would be able to answer my questions. One qualm I have was that there was little centralised effort to get us to know each other (in the difficult setting of a virtual internship)

Felt very valued by colleagues, they would really go above and beyond to make me feel welcome and invite me to all the different types of meetings, and then in those meetings consciously explain what they were doing to try to include me. Very good feedback and support system set up too - weekly meetings with manager, a grad buddy, other members of the team. And to top it off all the work I was doing in market oversight felt very meaningful.

Fair amount of support given, to a level I was happy with. Didn't hold my hand through tasks, but nor would this have been welcome. Manager went above and beyond in getting to know me and teaching me additional skills which weren't necessarily relevant to the role but great for me to develop. For instance, spent 4 hours teaching me how to use the bloomberg terminal, despite me only having a week left of my placement to use it.

This fluctuated a lot. There were definitely days when I was mostly sitting around doing nothing, but then also days where I chose to wake up at 6am, or go to bed at 11.30pm in order to finish off a particularly project. This could have potentially have been smoothed out a bit by better planning, but I think inevitable in any job and whenever I was bored I could always keep myself busy by talking to other people around the business, and learning more about what they do.

Fair amount of responsibility, aside from being entrusted with bloomberg I was invited indiscriminately to meetings where highly confidential information was discussed. This trust in me also translated to the work I was given - I was able to discuss the work I was doing with other colleagues who worked with those particular regulations and learn more about them, as well as have quite a lot of autonomy as to the direction of my project, or how I approached things.

A lot of this remains to be seen, but certainly I've developed a much greater understanding and appreciation of capital markets through undertaking this internship. I think that working at the FCA gives a really unique birds eye view of how things work from the perspective of companies and their disclosures and this commercial awareness will hold me in good stead when entering the world of work somewhere in the city. Also developed soft skills such as teamwork and working in a professional environment.

Really pleasant atmosphere. Everyone was very friendly and not formal at all - on my first day I was invited to a meeting with a lot of senior departmental managers, and they were doing the oreo challenge. This really set the pace for my internship - every morning the team would call in and have a chat over teas and coffees about the weekend or their pets or memes or anything else. Felt really welcoming.

The work placement was well organised. There were weekly 'lunch and learn' sessions with different people from around the business, as well as training for soft skills with Kaplan (though I didn't really enjoy this). I would say though that more than on a central level, on a departmental level things were very organised. I was invited to many different meetings, and had a really good experience, but from talking to different interns this depended a lot on which team you were in.

The company invests in you strongly. During the internship there are lots of training and development sessions. Even beyond this, if you take up the grad offer there is a really structured learning platform. For instance, many people go on to take additional qualifications such as the CFA, while being sponsored by the FCA. They are given time off to study for these exams, and which exams are taken are very flexible and depends on what each employee wants.

Very appealing job prospects, I think I will still look around elsewhere but I would be very happy accepting a grad offer from the FCA. They invest a lot in training up their graduates, and the graduates on my team seemed to have an incredible amount of responsibility given that they had been in the job for a year or two at most. I think thats one of the benefits of working at somewhere like the FCA with a flat structure.

Reasonable enough social scene given virtual internship. I heard that some interns went to have drinks with their team in person. I enjoyed the community project part of the placement - though this wasn't the most relevant to the work which the FCA does, it did give me an opportunity to socialise with lots of different interns and get to know others in the same position as me, which was a lot of fun. We plan to keep in touch and meet up later in the year in person, so I guess that is a success.

n/a - lived at home since virtual internship

n/a - virtual

n/a - virtual. There were the opportunity to join different networks but I didn't, suspecting this would involve at most a webinar