UK Retail Banking Summer Intern Review

I did enjoy the internship but I feel that as I was only there for 8 weeks there was only so much I could do but if I do get accepted onto the graduate scheme I know I will have a lot more responsibility and will enjoy it a lot more.

Everyone was very welcoming in the branch network and in head office. The HR team and my area director and branch manager were very helpful and provided me with all the support I needed. I was also given a buddy who was a current graduate who was always willing to provide me with support.

We were given guidance on the fact that we had to do a project and we were to spend time focussing on each area of the retail bank but on a day-to-day basis I was able to decide myself where I should work and what I should do that day.

I was very busy a lot of the time because the branch that I was placed at is the 3rd busiest branch in the country and so every member is staff is busy a lot of the time! However, in my last week when I needed to do work on my project and put the presentation together I was able to do this without having any distractions.

I was given a lot of responsibility in the sense that I was serving customers, without having been given any training, and was expected to know how to deal with their enquiries. However, I learnt a lot very quickly and became a key member of the coordinating team over the 8 weeks.

I think the skills I have developed over this internship have been extremely useful and will benefit me a lot in the future. Before the internship I was worried about my presentation skills, however, on the internship I was given many opportunities to use and develop these skills and now feel I am a lot better at presenting than when I started. I have gained many more team working and leadership skills that I know will help me if I am to get accepted onto a graduate scheme.h

The team I worked with in the branch were very friendly and welcoming to me, even though none of them were really sure what the internship was all about! The other interns were fantastic and when we had the opportunity to work together we had a really great time.

The internship as a whole across Barclays GRCB was very well run with us having master classes every wednesday and a few training days and intern events. However, I felt the retail scheme on it's own was not as well run as some of the other scheme but I understand that this is hard within retail because the skills you need to work well in retail and to be given a higher level of responsibility (as some interns had in other areas of the bank) will probably take about 8 weeks to develop!

Barclays were fantastic in letting us know how much they valued the inters and the graduates and how much they wanted us to want to work for them. They did not do many official training and development sessions with us but I know that they do a lot of this on the graduate scheme which is one of the reasons I am applying for it.

I have an interview for the retail graduate scheme tomorrow and I will hopefully get it! Having done the internship I was able to fast track through to the final round which consists of a business line/competency based interview and a short presentation (which will be no where near as tough as the one I had to do to the senior execs on the project I had during my internship!)

The other interns were fantastic. I was not able to go out with them as much as I would have liked because I had other commitments at the weekends but they were a great bunch of people and I will miss them a lot! It was my birthday during the internship and so quite a few interns came out with me for my birthday and we had a really great night.

I had to pay £139 a week to live in Queen Mary University halls. I would have loved it if I could have worked in Manchester rather than London as then I would not have had to pay for accommodation but unfortunately this was not the case. Going out was not as expensive as I thought it would be but it was still more expensive than I would have liked.

The nightlife was good in London but it was a lot more expensive than I would have liked.

The interns were always going out doing things so there were always things I could get involved in. The HR team also arranged for us to go go-karting and have a meal afterwards which was a really great day.