Intern - Investment Scheme Review

Overall I highly enjoyed my placement with M&G. The experience was rich from a learning as well as a social point-of-view. I felt the firm leveraged very well its past experience in this area, which overall meant the internship was well thought-through and highly beneficial.

I felt valued by my colleagues overall. This was especially evident after I completed a piece of work for the people I was working with/for: these tended to be good at giving feedback and expressing how the work had helped them do their job. This made me feel valued since I had a clear picture of my place within the team and how I contributed to the day-to-day running and ultimately the success of my particular business area.

I was given limited support and guidance by my manager. However, I did feel the support I received from the people I directly worked with made up for this: these tended to be very good at giving clear directions and making themselves available if I had questions or needed further help, which was much appreciated.

I was healthily busy on a daily basis. This was surprising and very nice, as it meant I could have a really good work-life balance, while still being quite occupied in the office.

Overall I was given a good level of responsibility during my internship, with respect to both the content/material and the end-use of the work I did. This provided me with a healthy challenge, one that often stretched me but one in which I did not feel out of my depth. The internship thus provided an excellent learning curve overall.

The skills I developed at M&G will absolutely help me, in part for my degree studies but especially so for future work. Through the extensive trainings I received in many different areas of the business I feel well versed in talking about the M&G business as a whole. However, through gaining an in-depth experience in my particular business area, I feel much more conversant in important investment concepts and the overall fund management process. Together, these act not just to increase, but indeed to cement my conviction in pursuing a career in fund management. I feel privileged that M&G gave me the chance to work here and that this experience has come to be an important building block in my future career.

The general atmosphere was quite "heads-down" but this did not come at the detriment of it being friendly. People greeted each other regularly and were very amicable to each other. This provided a good environment in which to knuckle down and get the work done, without it feeling oppressive or dull.

Again, M&G scores highly on this point too. HR did an overall great job at organising a full roster of events, trainings, and presentations to keep us occupied.

The M&G business seems very proud of its internship programme. As mentioned elsewhere, the business does put on many trainings to teach us as much of what it does in the time we have. We regularly met top fund managers and it was encouraging to see such people take time out of their schedules to come speak to us, indeed without any sort of hierarchy and in totally open fora. This left a very positive impression. I feel my particular business area was not so good with this: there were very obvious ways I could have been more included and involved. Overall though M&G scores highly on this front.

In short, the future employment prospects within M&G are highly appealing and I'd love to be offered a full-time graduate position.

The intern cohort was very amicable.

London is an expensive city; there's no getting around that. That said, interns were well remunerated and this made living in the capital more than comfortable. Thank you, M&G!

I didn't check this out.

There was a good range of activities outside of work in which to get involved, for example pub quizzes or sporting events organised by various internal staff networks.