Investment Banking Division Internship Review

Really enjoyed it. The people were great (both the fellow interns and the employees I worked with). I thought the work was interesting and a good, challenging level. Generally the internship was well run by HR, with just a few minor bits of confusion and mismanagement.

My boss started the internship by saying that he would never make me do work for the sake of it - i.e. all of the work I do would be adding value to the business somehow. I thought this was great and meant that the stuff I did was valued by my colleagues and is more rewarding personally, and makes it easier to motivate yourself to do it. I know that this was not always the case with all the interns.

My team were very, very supportive. I knew very little about finance going into the internship, but my team were very helpful at getting me up to speed with all the terminology and ensuring I understood everyting. They gave me quite challenging work and this meant at times I made mistakes.. However, they always explained things through to me and never got annoyed. Couldn't ask for a more supportive set of people to work with.

As a consequence of them not giving me pointless work, this meant there were times when I had very little to do and would just read the FT or do some online training. These times were pretty boring and time goes slowly. But on the most part I was busy which was a good thing, but not ridiculously so that I would have to stay stupidly late.

I was given lots of responsibility, working on their models, and making lots of adjustments. This was a lot more responsibility than many of my peers had, and I did very little boring adjustment of powerpoint slides or updating data which was good!

If I stay in the industry, I think I have a pretty good grounding in the products my desk work on and my underlying financial knowledge has improved a lot (gone from nothing to something at least!), so that will be useful for the future.

Generally everyone was easy to get on with. My team and the adjacent desks had a lot of fun, we would often go out for drinks or lunch a couple of times, and there would always be jokes going on in the office.Fun place to be.

Ok I suppose. Not perfect, but not too bad. Most of the events ran to schedule but there were things like a social where the drinks ran out after an hour, before many of the interns had arrived. There was a time when everyone turned up for a lecture and waited 15 minutes before going back to our desks as the guy giving it hadn't showed up.

3 days of training which I didn't find hugely useful. Whole day with this motivational speaker ("maximising your potential" was the title) which was a complete waste of time. Would have been more useful having greater time spent on Excel training or market knowledge, etc.

Haven't found out about jobs yet. Everyone will find out on the last day if they are offered a placement or not. I know some divisions just aren't recruiting at all - the interns on those desks were told that at the very start of the internship, which they found disheartening.

Ish - generally people were working very hard and working very late so there wouldn't be a huge amount of socialising mid week. Weekends people sometimes met up for football or drinks or something similar. So average I guess.

Expensive - rent was about £150 per week minimum, everywhere for lunch nearby is super expensive, a pint costs nearly £5 in all the local pubs. The square mile is a vey expensive place to live and work.

Well London has nighlife of every kind

No