Investment Banking Summer Analyst Review

The learning experience truly is like none other. I can assure you that for the ten weeks you spend at J.P. Morgan, there is no other internship where you will learn as much as quickly. After the detailed top-of-the-line training from some of the best tutors on the Street, you begin being useful to your team from the get go. Yes there will be times where you're required to stay late. Yes there will times where you're tired at the desk, but I found you learn as much about yourself as about the job in those times. Not only that, but there's also lots of activities with HR, almost on a weekly basis, that keep you engaged and teach you about the different segments of the bank as well, so you won't be stuck in a bubble in your division.

I found that my colleagues treated me with respect, gradually building up their expectations as to the level of responsibility I could manage and increasingly considering my input as I continued to learn and grow on the job. Unlike what you hear at other investment banks and sell-side advisors, I was not treated as a resource. Being in a relatively small coverage team really helped me get to know those around me to foster a relationship with my colleagues both inside and outside the workplace.

For being such a large multinational bank with thousands of employees, you'd be surprised at how much I contact with upper management there is. Not only were there scheduled lunches, presentations, and after work events scheduled with senior management, but they were easily accessible during the regular course of business. We were also allotted with senior mentors who served as a point of contact for investment banking career advice and as an avenue to get an idea of the bigger picture for what exactly it means to work in finance for the long-haul.

My days flew by. Even now that I've come to the end of my internship, I cannot believe how quickly this time has gone. My days were packed with research projects, presentations, client calls, sales pitches, and email workflow. There wasn't a dull moment at the desk, which makes for the best experience in my opinion. Another important point here is that you will not experience the same day twice, every day is different. Even if you're working on a project throughout your entire internship or snippets of different client deliverables, you'll always be engaged and put to good use.

I found that you had to earn this more than anything. When you come in, your tasks are simple and the team is gauging whether or not you can be trusted with increasingly difficult financial models and client-facing products and presentations. As soon as you start earning your teams trust, your responsibilities begin growing exponentially. Even though you are not, strictly speaking, allowed to deliver end-products to clients (as there is always an analyst or associate to go over your work before it goes out), it still feels very gratifying to see those documents or comments or presentations go out knowing you were a main contributing factor to them.

The biggest takeaway from this internship is beyond a doubt the ability to multi-task, handling separate workflows at the same time and having the discipline and organisational skills to deliver each of them on time and without any faults. When you work within teams as you do at JPM, you'll receive tasks from various analysts and associates and you won't just be working on a single transaction. I've found that responding accurately and expressing myself effectively became key in managing expectations and delivering work that was acceptable to the highest of JPM standards. Keeping to this real-life standard will help me deliver better-quality work in academia.

The office is generally quiet, as you'd expect. Sure, you have the occasional birthday celebration where there's cake and a bit of banter, but don't expect there to be much going on on the floor of the Investment Banking division. Everyone is pretty busy and usually working quietly, but that doesn't mean you can't get up and approach those around you if you have any questions/concerns. The way the desks are set up allow for you to be comfortable at your place, but this also means that there will be plenty of space between people which means chat is usually reduced to whatever is work-oriented and necessary.

Every week had an activity planned by Human Resources or our individual staffers. The progression was seamless and you'd regularly get a chance to meet and greet the other interns from the banks divisions. Not only did we have a good enough training at the beginning that we were useful from the very beginning, but as the end of the summer approached and the deal/project flow began to increase, my ability to help out as an intern was hitting its peak as I aligned myself to the business needs.

I personally think the entire internship programme is a huge investment in interns like me. I honestly believe that we are more of a burden than a help overall because of our lack of on-the-job experience when we get here. It takes more time out of the banks analysts and associates days to teach us interns how to utilise all the resources available to us and get presentations and client-facing documents up to a J.P. Morgan standard. I spent most of my time on the job learning how to be an investment banker as opposed to producing investment banking work. In that sense, the firm has invested a great amount to give me a spot at a desk.

J.P. Morgan Cazenove is the ultimate investment bank in The City. There really is nowhere else to work if you want an overarching availability of financial products delivered from a traditional, corporate-broking business model. The marriage of the multinational American bank and the client-focused English investment bank made for the best possible financial powerhouse. In my opinion, the team-based culture, capable senior management, and consistent deal/project flow make this the best investment bank to work for as a graduate.

We tried to organise joint events but unfortunately not many of our schedules aligned so there wasn't much success here.

Canary Wharf is quite expensive given the high concentration of corporates around the area. However, there are plenty of green areas to give you a breather when you need them and the fact that you're so well situated on the Jubilee Underground Line gives you access to all of London, where you can find much better student-oriented areas to socialise on a more reasonable budget. Adding to this, if you feel like going on a shopping spree, you don't even have to exit the building should the weather display its usual English character as there is an entire shopping district under the ground level.

Canary Wharf doesn't have the best nightlife or cheapest pints around, unfortunately.

There are J.P. Morgan sports clubs and other groups built around the different ethnic cultures that make the diverse J.P. Morgan community.