One of our third-year students Essak Suleman, currently studying Economics explains his process to a securing a BNY internship.  

How did you find and secure your internship? 

My close friend had already secured a internship with BNY, so he suggested I applied too. I went on LinkedIn, found the link and applied for it. I applied quite late in February; they came back to me around March. It was supposed to be a 30-minute interview and ended up being 45 minutes as it was more like a chat. The next morning, I had received a phone call to say I had been successful, so it had been a 24 hour turn around from the interview taking place to successfully securing my internship.  
 
 What did your internship involve? 

It was a ten-week internship, and I was placed in the Control and Risk Department. They had their own systems and certain programmes, so I became familiar with this within the first week. Then I was placed under a manager who had given me three projects to work on with three different people. These projects included: 

  • Training an AI robot into reading documents and being able to produce a successful answer.  
  • Updating their Standard Operating Procedure, these were documents that needed updating to create instructions in case something went wrong.  
  • Conducting and being a part of external meetings from across the world, including New York, Poland, India and Brazil. I had the opportunity to speak to a range of people including senior directors, managing directors and even the CEO.  
     
    What did you learn from doing the internship? 

    The main thing I would say is you know professionalism, but also learning how the corporate world works in the office environment.  You must have good relationships with your colleagues and your managers and know how to manage your time. Once you’re within the organisation you can get a real sense of what is going on, before this internship I had retail work experience, and this was completely different.    

    I would say confidence too. Put yourself out there and try to sell yourself because I know there may be some fear/nerves at times, but you must get out of your comfort zone. I would have one to one meeting with my manager weekly and they would often support and encourage building my confidence too, as they could see at times, I may have been nervous.  

At the end of the day, we are all humans from the senior managers to the other interns.  

What advice would you give current second years looking for an internship? 

There’s no better way to practice.  

Apply, do the tests and interviews because you will need to be able to show up to an interview with confidence. I feel like this only comes when you progressively do more and more of the applications, and it’s very rare that you’re going to get an acceptance offer straight away. Remember you are always up against all the students in the country so keep pushing. Just don’t stop applying or give up. 

If an internship/experience like Essak’s interests you, please keep an eye out on the BNY internship page: Internship Program | BNY