FLDP RBBL (summer intern) Review

The community created by the FLDP team provided a great support network which meant I never felt alone, always had people to ask questions of and, above all, a great set of colleagues to share experiences and have fun with.

The full-time Future Leaders and other interns were a fantastic group of people to work with. However, I didn't quite connect with my Line Manager. Fortunately, some other members of my team were very helpful and treated me like a fellow team member, not just some intern.

Direct support from my Line Manager wasn't great, but part of the programme requirements are that you are comfortable establishing a role for yourself so introducing myself to other team members meant I soon had some work to do.

This internship is normally 8 weeks. This year it was 6 (due to Olympics) which made it hard to fit everything in. As a result, my LM provided less to do than normal, but this did mean I had some very busy periods and some other very quite periods. This would have been more spread out on a longer internship.

I couldn't believe how much I was trusted to make decisions and the willingess with which some colleagues I worked with took instructions from me.

Not going to be much use in my degree, but set me right on the road to a career in Finance.

The office was pretty standard, but having the 40 odd other interns to arrange evening entertainment and meet for lunch was great.

The FLDP HR team are friendly and well organised.

A generous remuneration policy meant I had no qualms about investing my time in this placement, and the prospect of graduate recruitment subject to good performance is of course very appealing. There were many people willing to help me decide where in the company would be best for me, should I be chosen.

I don't know if I will have been chosen yet, but we were told that ~70% of interns moved on to the full time scheme last year, and most of those that didn't were usually people who were ineligible (usually not finishing degree this year) or didn't want to.

It was like starting at a new uni again as we had a 3 day induction involving all 40 interns. Throughout the scheme, we were also introduced to people on the graduate scheme. There were social events contributed to Barclays as well as an organised community volunteering day.

To be honest, I don't think anyone goes to Canary Wharf expecting to find cheapness...

Canary Wharf is ok, there's a few bars around but nothing for any clubbers out there.

I was a little disappointed to not find a social running club, or indeed advertisement of any clubs/societies within Barclays. However, this may have been because I had trouble getting onto the intranet's social network, which is probably where details of these things are held.