Investment Banking (Barclays): Listen to Angela (2020) talk about her internship in investment banking at Barclays this past summer.

Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up, the Duke Career Center's student produce podcast showcasing real students summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie and today, we're talking to Angela, who worked in investment banking at Barclays this past summer.

Angela: Hi, my name's Angela. I'm currently a senior at Duke, majoring in environmental science and minoring in finance. I'm originally from Seattle. Spent eight years, ten years growing up in Beijing, before coming to Duke. I wanted to be a scientist. When I first got to Duke to join a lab and everything and I decided that it wasn't the right career path for me. So I start looking at other opportunities around. So sophomore year, junior year, summer, I was at Barclays in the investment banking group specifically covering the media and communications industry and I will be going back full time.

Stephanie: Oh wow, congratulations. So let's focus, I guess, mainly on your this past summer, but if you want to bring in stuff from previous summers too that'd be great. So how did you find out about this position at Barclays? Like what was kind of the way that you ended up getting it?

Angela: Yeah, for sure. Investment banking recruiting and finance recruiting in general is very structured. So, you know, coming in as early as sophomore year and freshman year, that what positions will be open and which firms are hiring? So I learn about Barclays probably sophomore fall. Back then I was already recruiting for other bulge bracket banks in terms of sophomore internships. And there are some alumni who are working at Barclays who come down to campus, talk to people specifically in organizations that I am part of and I just kept in touch.

Stephanie: Awesome. So what was the interview process like?

Angela: Yeah, for sure. I went, I got my internship through a program actually called a Sophomore Springboard, which is designed specifically for diverse individuals and people of different backgrounds. And you have an earlier interview schedule and I got my offer pretty early in May of my sophomore year.

Stephanie: Wow!

Angela: So the interviews consist of a phone interview at the beginning where it was a Duke alum who actually interviewed me over the phone. It was casual conversation about my background, behavioral stuff, about why I'm interested in finance, why Barclays specifically. And then I had a super day in New York, which consisted of two, three interviews back to back, each one around 30 minutes long, a mixture of behavioral and technical interviews.

Stephanie: That's cool. So what exactly were you doing day-to-day at work? Describe a normal day.

Angela: For sure. Normal day you usually come in around 9:00 a.m. You answer a lot of emails from maybe the night before. You look at what, you have a good sense of where you might be doing for a day. It really varies a lot day-to-day, depending on the projects that you have. Usually when you have a project, it's a lot of work on PowerPoint, Excel. It's a lot of especially as the intern is usually a lot of turning over iterations of comments on PowerPoint. So The managing director would like scribble a bunch of comments and how the PowerPoint looks and then you go back and make all these changes or they would get they would give ideas and be like it would be great to have a slide on this. And then the Vice President, the Associate, your Analyst who you're working with will help you draft that what that slide looks like and you might be in charge of creating the initial draft. Still, it's a lot of PowerPoint iterations. It might also involve research and gathering data on different industries, different companies. It also involves sitting in a lot of meetings maybe with the senior management of the company, maybe just internally, maybe, maybe just your group and a few other groups withi