Financial Control Analyst Review

This internship was honestly more enjoyable than I have imagined - exposure to real work, participation in meetings with seniors and cross functional teams were valuable experiences to not only develop my technical skills but also my soft skills. This makes me feel I have utilised my summer and lets me taste how it feels to be a banker.

Over eighty percent. What differentiates my internship experience in Santander UK as opposed to those in my home country (Hong Kong) is that my collegaues in my team trust my abilities and allow me to work on classified information - subjectively speaking, they are risking a leakage of this info as well as me messing up the database and possibly not being able to recover it - nevertheless they gave me important jobs to do and this makes me feel being valued and part of the team.

I am really lucky to be looked after by a frank, involving and intelligent manager. He talks straight and points out to me what he is disatisfied with people's work and processes in the company in a constructive way, which gives me room to think about what improvements and innovation I could bring to the company with a fresh pair of eyes. My manager is very supportive in terms of answering my questions and explaining his understanding of systems as well.

Really depends on business needs. Some reports are done and presented at month end and obviously workload doubles by those times. I also have daily routine work to do as well so even when there is nothing special happening, I still have something to work on. There's also this fantastic online learning system provided by Santander, and most of all it's free - so whenever I'm finding myself free I go on there and take some courses to increase my competency, and hence I never really "have nothing to do".

My manager has given as much as an intern could take to me - as mentioned, daily/monthly reports involving classified information, presentation on my innovations and business trips to headquarters in various locations in UK. I think the degree of responsibility boils down to how much passion an intern demonstrates - the more he is, the more the manager appreciates and values him/her and naturally the extent of responsibility is determined.

I would say soft skills are the most important bit I have learnt during my internship. Working in financial control, I admit the technical skills involved could not get anywhere near to what I am doing in my mathematics degree; yet daily emailing, meeting and socialing with colleagues greatly improved my people skills and made me aware of the 'British way' of doing things.

It is friendly! Perhaps it is Santander, a bank majoring in Retail, the environment as much less stressed than I would have imagined. Colleagues literally just take time off and chat to each other (even colleagues they do not know) when they have been stuck in complicated work for hours. There is a strong sense of family here, and I think that is a subtle working culture developed over years in Santander that other places do not have.

I think the balanced is striked well between having a broad and brief structure and allowing flexibility in working with my own team. There is a weekly timetable for the whole internship, including one-to-one sessions with manager, branch visit in the midst of the internship and regular webinars with graduates/seniors in Santander, which allows us to constantly absorb what we are supposed to as interns, but also allowing us to devote ourselves with our teams for the rest of the time.

I think the firm has provided enough resources for an intern to use - as to how well an intern absorbs, again it simply depends on the intern himself/herself. For example free online learning courses are great training the firm provides - to me learning is always the best form of investment. In terms of working environment basics like working computers and telephones are available and I do not see anything extra that an intern really needs - instead training and development as built through close coordination and working with manager/my team.

I think they have well-structured graduate programmes and interns have obvious advantage in entering these programmes. Not sure about exact career paths but I think employment prospects are pretty much standard. They do provide sufficient chances for one to demonstrate his/her abilities during the grad programme for seniors to recognise, so if the graduate is really good I don't see any reason for them not get promoted and offered with a better role.

Doesn't this depend on how sociable you are??

Cheaper than London I guess - at least beer is <£3 a pint rather than £5 in London. Being a Londoner, everything from accommodation to entertainment in Milton Keynes is cheap - I'm not in place to answer this question.

I go back to London after work - no idea.