Enterprise Risk Intern Review

The internship at Santander was a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful experience. Everyone at Santander that I met was very welcoming, and the Bank is a pleasant corporate environment to work in.

My colleagues expected me to complete work that would be useful for the company. For this reason, I felt valued by my colleagues.

My manager and buddy were always available to talk to whenever I had any questions about either my work or the Bank itself.

During the first couple of weeks I was not very busy due to my online access unfortunately not being sorted out prior to my arrival. However, this only happened because I was assigned a new manager only a few days before my arrival and she was not informed of the processes she had to go through to sort out my access. Once my access was sorted, I was busy for the majority of my internship. I worked on one major project throughout most of my internship, accompanied by a range of different smaller tasks.

I was surprised and impressed by the amount of responsibility I was given during my placement. Some of the work I completed went to a very high level within the Bank. By trusting me with this responsibility, I was not only able to gain much more personally from the internship, but I was also able to add value to the company with the work I completed during my placement.

First of all, this placement helped me to gain valuable experience on how to act within a corporate environment, which I will be able to take forward with me in any future jobs I pursue. The placement also helped me improve my time management, communication skills and technical skills on programmes such as Excel and PowerPoint, all of which will be useful to me throughout the remainder of my degree studies and beyond.

The atmosphere in the office was professional, yet relaxed. It is a very visible company, meaning that as an Intern you are able to interact with high level directors without feeling intimidated.

The internship programme has a good structure in place, through the requirement to have weekly 121's with your manager and the on/off boarding events at the beginning and end of the placement. However, I personally feel an improvment can be made when the programme has to deal with change. For example, their was a lack of communication when I was assigned a new manager and this hindered my online access during the first week.

Santander is a company that fully invests in their interns, as they are interested in bringing back the best talent for graduate roles with the Bank in the future. They actively encourage you to further your own abilities by completing online training, of which there is a huge amount available on the company's intranet.

Santander provides an attractive working enivornment. The graduate scheme is appealing, in the sense that you are able to rotations that allow you to see different parts of the Bank and help you to decide what areas are best suited to you.

My fellow interns were all very nice and over the course of the 10 weeks I was able to develop good relationships with them.

Working and living in London is expensive. However, Santander do provide a London living allowance in your salary.

It's London - it has everything.

Yes, a range of different people invited me to different events throughout my internship.