Intern Review

My role was that of a summer intern in the Financial Stability Strategy and Risk directorate of the Bank of England. I was given an own project with several objectives at the start of the internship which I owned and had to report on in weekly bilaterals with my line manager. It involved me writing a script for automation of data extraction from pdf tables in R and then writing a piece analysing the extracted data.

I have certainly learnt many new skills in that internship, mainly coding in R. At the beginning, I was given the choice which programming language to choose and after some research I found that R had the most suitable package to my task. I spent 4-5 weeks writing my script and automated the extraction of circa 130 tables from pdfs with about 55 pages. I also honed my project management skills and practiced public speaking.

Yes, the fact that I had my own project meant that it was only me working on that specific area. Furthermore, I had the impression that my work was really helping the team and contributing towards the goals of the directorate and that my work could be used further even when I would have already been gone because I had automated most steps of the process. In fact, many people asked me questions about how I had done it and how anyone else could do it.

I would say that the support I got during my internship and during my project was definitely enough and in the quantity that I requested. It was a good balance of me having my own freedom to explore different routes to go down and develop my project and also my line manager always being available to help me with any questions or issues I was facing. Regular feedback sessions also meant that I had the chance to improve on the way.

The general atmosphere was very good and friendly. Everyone was really welcoming and tried to make me a part of the team and in fact, I felt like that throughout. There were regular socials and even a summer party for the whole directorate. I felt like team building and fostering an accomodative working environment was a very high priority for management and that was reflected in the way people interacted with one another, overall very positive.

I thoroughly enjoyed my internship and in fact, I applied for a full time position. The outcome of that application is not known to me at this point given the Bank has quite long time periods when it comes to fast tracking interns to the graduate program. It was a very good experience and a great addition to my economics degree. It really showed my how a future job for me could look like and I am very glad I had the opportunity to do the internship.

Yes

I would say try to learn as much about the Bank of England as possible and make sure you understand what drives their initiatives / workstreams. This is especially applicable to the area of the Bank of England you are applying to. You should definitely have some good industry knowledge and general macroeconomic background. What also helps is relating your own experiences to the values the Bank has and seeing where you could fit in and how.