Commercial and Private Banking Summer Intern Review

The internship as a whole was enjoyable as I loved being in a new city for the summer. My actual placement was pretty poor as I was given very little responsibility and I spent a large amount of my time searching for work and arranging shadowing in different teams.

Some of my colleagues were very appreciative of my efforts, but others seemed to take us for granted. I was allocated to help with the file migration for a large number of days and I spent a large amount of time inputting addresses into letters. Considering I am studying a relevant degree, I feel my skills could have been put to more use.

My LM was very busy indeed meaning that I was given very little attention. Sometimes he went days without talking to me, and when he left to go on holiday I was given very little guidance as to what I should be doing. When he was free a took a bit of time to read my work but any feedback was tedious, and he said so himself that they shouldn't have asked for interns in their team.

Given that I had a large amount of time to work on the CSR challenge and the individual and group project I would say I was not very busy at all. It was very frustrating as I knew that others were given lots of work to do, and sometimes I was spent twiddling my thumbs. The first week was the worst, I wasn't given internet access until the 4th day and file drive access took even longer, so I had to trawl the company intranet. When we asked for things to fill the time we were asked to sort out people's files - something I didn't expect to do on an internship when I was here to learn

Very little responsibility, this could be due to the high profile classification of some of the credit cases but overall I was treated very differently to other colleagues and I began to look for my own things to do.

Shadowing helped me learn but I was always eager to be given more eg. more client meetings.

Demographic was majority male and over 50, very few graduates. The other interns in my building did make up for this.

Some bits - induction were very good, but during the internship there was little structure and the review system is warped,

Invested a large amount in induction week. There were infrequent learning lunches, but they were often tedious and impersonal.

Average, think other firms may support me more

Very good social scene. Over 40 interns in Edinburgh. Spent every weekend doing things around the city. The company organised the bare minimum of events for us however, all socialising was done by us.

Pretty pricey. No financial assistance given to relocation to Edinburgh (not a personal choice). I know other firms support interns to find and even pay for accommodation.

Fantastic

Very few. Signed up for netball, but never heard anything back. Went to one team drinks the whole time. Only opportunities were our own nothing else really.