Intern

Initially started with options for on campus interviews on the university's career center.

I selected Barcap, and had a few one-on-one interviews with various people in IBD (associate - director level).

After the initial on campus interview, we were invited to fill out the online application (including the standard math / IQ test). The next stage was an invitation to London for an Assessment Center.

The Assessment Center was fairly straightforward. The morning consisted of a case study, where we were put into groups of 4, and then had to analyze the financing of a mine in a generic 3rd world country. We had a couple hours to work on the case study (complete with "news interruptions", etc) and then presented our recommendations.

After the case study, there was a bit of a networking lunch, and then each person had between 3 and 6 half-hour interviews with different teams. They were relatively flexible about this, and some people managed to get "extra" interview slots (i.e. if they only had 4 slots, but also really were interested in talking to the IBD Healthcare team). After all of the interview, we were given a sheet of paper and asked to rank the teams we interviewed with in order of preference.

During the networking lunch, some other people came over from the office and we got a chance to talk to them and ask them all questions. I thought this was pretty interesting and useful to get more perspectives from different people outside the context of interviewing.

I'm not sure how the timing worked out for everyone else, but I got a phone call from one of the teams that I interviewed with (now my current boss) on the way to the airport leaving the assessment center, saying that they would like to have me on as an intern.