I don't think I really came in with an expectation because I knew that there was a rotational aspect. In terms of settling into the Graduate Programme you're given six weeks of training before you join the programme, so I was extremely comfortable with my graduate cohort within the first couple of days. I was really excited about going into the training centre and they're colleagues now but they quickly became friends and I think in the future they'll be a very strong network for me when I move around the bank. In terms of settling into the training, straight away it was great fun, we played a lot of trading games and it was a very interactive session and you really got to know your peers as well, which is always nice with those kinds of things.

In terms of the job, we had so many speakers from the wholesale bank come in and speak to us while we were doing our training that we had an idea of two or three people that worked in every area, and what they did and how it was structured. So before we went in we had an idea of how the wholesale bank fitted together.

I do work with some big characters, to give you an example, at the moment I'm working in Corporate Debt Capital Markets, and the head of the team, every time we complete a deal, gets out the vuvuzela, what they used in the World Cup in South Africa, and just blows that and the whole floor just turns round and looks at him. It just kind of brings a big personality to the team so it gives the team more of a place on the floor. I've been really pleasantly surprised by quite how friendly and quite how much of a Lloyds community there is. You're witness to a lot of really exciting things happening, deals happening and announcements all over the trading floor when a deal goes on. But you're not necessarily the person behind it, you may have put together a few pitch books to send to that company prior to the trade, but it's the more senior guys, but there is a real sense of excitement and because of that we're always working towards something.

On my final interview I met two senior females from the bank, both who are very inspiring characters. They've had fairly long-term careers both with Lloyds and outside of Lloyds, so they really made me want to join banking and join Lloyds Banking Group in particular.

I think for people who don't work at banks who know Lloyds just as a retail bank on the high street, they'd be quite surprised to know that so much investment has been made into our wholesale business, in particular the products side. The capital markets division and the markets division itself have had a lot of investment which has seen people brought in externally as well as lots of new graduates being brought on board to be developed for their future careers.

At the moment I'm on my six month Relationship Management Placement, so I've really enjoyed that because I get to work with clients and financial institutions from across the UK. The team's really fun and it's quite a steep learning curve at first but I love interacting with people and representing the bank.

When I first joined the bank it was a combination of both excitement and nerves. Having never worked for a large institution before you don't really know what to expect. I think I probably had some preconceptions as well about what it would be like, but since having joined obviously everyone's very friendly and happy to help you learn and I've had a really good time.

I suppose the main preconceptions about banking are, well since having joined the bank I've realised it's not all men and you're not working until 10pm every night, and actually what you do or in particular what Lloyds does a lot of which is lend to clients is a very social thing: it makes the world go round. I think for those who are new to their career, there's a lot that's probably misinformed.

Lloyds is very supportive of young females who join the bank. There's the Breakthrough Committee and also for the female graduates you get quite a lot of attention in getting involved in events and mentoring other females who are looking to come into the industry.

For any students applying to Lloyds Banking Group, or any graduate scheme, I think it's very easy to become fixated on the technical elements of your application, and I think it's often overlooked that you need to be a well-rounded human being and that you need to have life experiences because you will be working with people both in the bank and often you'll have clients, and it's very important to be technically strong but also to have the soft skills that mean that you can get along with people as well.

I decided to join the grad programme because I was quite excited by the idea of working in different areas of the bank; also working in different locations all throughout the country, quite UK focused which was nice. I think generally speaking the best thing has been really being given ownership of tasks and coming in and being relied upon straight away. They don't hold your hand, you're expected to have a certain amount of ability to pick up things quite quickly, and that's great, but at the same time you've also got the support if you need it.

My first placement was working in the Risk Chief Operating Office so kind of like the core and the hub of Risk. I was working with the legal and regulatory projects that the bank has to do each year to comply with regulation and legislation that is from the government and international bodies. What we were doing is, I was involved with helping out with the prioritisation of projects. Obviously there's a finite budget that has to be adhered to in terms of doing these projects so we really had to work out what was the most important projects to do within the budget that had been allocated and what could be left until next year or didn't actually need to be done at all, and really trying to help prioritise that.

My second placement is what I'm on at the moment, it's based in Edinburgh, I'm working in the Corporate Real Estate Business Support Unit and we're working with companies that basically need our support to continue through the tough conditions in the market. So whether that'll be extending the lending out a bit further than we would've done previously and just giving them a bit more support. It's basically a unit where the ratio of customers to staff is a lot lower so you deal with just a handful of customers in a team so you can give them a lot more time and a lot more support. You can understand the problems that they're facing in the market and try to help support them, and also look after the bank's position in terms of ensuring that we're not carrying a lot of bad debt that we won't be able to reclaim. If we can help these companies out ultimately it will help them but it will also help the Lloyds Bank benefit in the future from those companies being profitable. I mean if they do well then we do well.

I like the customer work, it's not directly customer facing; it's not going out on meetings with them necessarily but being able to pick up the phone and speak to them is really rewarding, particularly if you've done something that really helped them out and they're really appreciative of it. It does make you feel good, about what you've done and it feels like you've actually come into work and contributed something, not just to the company which you would do every day hopefully but also to the society I suppose and the people who work in the companies you're helping out.

My next role is working in Wholesale Transaction Banking, I'm going to be back in London. I know it's working with the senior manager that's responsible for business development so trying to steer where transaction banking is going to go in the future and the kind of strategy that they're going to be working on, so I'm really looking forward to it.

The other thing as well which is good, the bank's so big, has so many employees, so many different areas to work in, but the roles you do you can see how they interlink with each other. The things you learn like regulatory stuff that I'd learnt in my first placement, you really understand when you get into your other placements and you can see how everything ties in, and actually the bank becomes a lot smaller and you realise exactly how it works and all the moving parts and things. 

So when you join the Graduate Programme you're provided with a buddy or mentor, that's probably a graduate from the year before you who can just provide you with a bit more guidance about any kind of questions you have. I think the buddying system at Lloyds is really good because the buddy has been through the Graduate Programme themselves they have an idea of the questions that you would like to ask and they know what it's like to move around placements and it's really good that you've got people you can ask on the programme.

I think that's one thing that I've been really impressed with in the bank is the visibility of senior leaders. Everyone's really approachable and senior leaders are really happy for you to contact them or put time in their diary for a chat. It's not very hierarchical or not as much as you'd expect from a company as big as Lloyds is, so it feels very welcoming and a very friendly and approachable atmosphere.

While I've been on the Graduate Programme, I've had the chance to get involved in lots of community initiatives; I've taken part in a day to make a difference in the community where our whole team went along to a hospice in the South West and we were painting fences and doing some gardening and generally making over their garden for them. I've also been involved in various pieces of fundraising, so cake sales, running a half marathon, everything to support the charity of the year which is Save the Children. So I've definitely been really impressed at how the bank promotes community involvement and I think for a really large company Lloyds has got a really impressive social responsibility ethic as well. 

I work in Telephone Banking Finance, specifically on projects that aim to reduce the amount of time we spend as customers on calls, so the way we're doing that is trying to put in as automated options and multi-skilling as many colleagues as we can so that calls are a lot shorter. One of the most interesting about that role is that as a current account holder myself is that it's a completely free service to us and the amount of cost that is involved with a two-minute call is just phenomenal, so how does a bank operate when they're not charging you to use their services.

So we were set, as a group of graduates, a charity challenge where the Finance graduates had to compete against the HR graduates to raise a total of £36,000 each for Save the Children which is the Group's charity of the year. So I took the lead from the Finance graduates and we set about back in the end of December, early January and thought what's the best way we could possibly make £36,000. There were eighteen of us and we were thinking £2000 each is a lot of money to make in six months.

What we decided to do is involve the rest of the Finance community, so we came up with our own challenge to set to the wider finance community where they got in teams and they had to raise £400 over a period of 100 days. It would not only offer them the chance to win prizes that we had, but it also meant that they could do the sort of extra-curricular stuff we had access to, improving your leadership skills, your networking skills, communication and all those sorts of things.

We went and spoke to the Finance Board, which was a great opportunity. If I hadn't got involved in the charity stuff then I wouldn't have been able to meet those sort of people. We pitched the idea to them and they really liked the simplicity of it, and it's something that had not been done before in the community and was something that would bring everyone together hopefully. We had really good senior management buy-in and they helped us promote the challenge throughout the community and as a result we had 90 teams sign up bringing us in a total of £115,000 from those people and adding to that to our kind of extra fundraising on top, our sporting challenges, we came in at a total of £123,000.

It's a staggering amount of money and I think sitting back in December / January we were just really nervous that we were never going to get anywhere close. We did one doughnut sale and raised £500 and thought 35 and a half thousand to go through doughnuts is going to be a long slog. It was good to see that we could do something that A, raised so much money for the charity but B, brought the Finance community closer together. 

I'd say the strongest part of the graduate programme is the ability to influence it yourself. A lot of other programmes are very stringent in the conditions of where you go, what you will do and how you develop. With ours, the development, it's all about you and if you want to do something, you can do something. So as long as you're active in seeking out opportunities, seeking out what you want to do, the support is there behind you. That goes again for the roles, I've done two roles now, and my first role I couldn't have been happier with and my second role has really been stretching again. The strongest thing is the fact you can do that and that's why I would say to people to apply. You can tailor it to yourself and you can make it the best for you, whereas you won't get that at other places.

Across Lloyds there's quite a few areas of support, we've got four main areas: the women's network, which is Breakthrough Network, we've got the Gem Network which is group ethic minority, we've got Rainbow Network which is lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender and then we have Access, which is for our disabled colleagues.

I've done quite a lot of work with Access and for Access, not just in relation to my own disability but in trying to make disability a stronger aspect of the company. It is very, very strong in this company, the Access Network, I must say. If anybody does need support they will be given it. As soon as you flag something up, flag a disability that you have and say, you'll go through a triage process behind any support that you ask for and within a few weeks anything you need will be there. If you were joining the organisation all of that would be done before you joined. One of the things I've done for the Access Network was we put together a pack which all applicants who apply who were disabled would get prior to joining. That lists everything that we would do to support that person and that colleague just so that they could successfully complete and do their role.

So the reason I decided to apply for the Lloyds Summer Internship was because my CV at that particular point wasn't particularly strong. I'd worked in a couple of pubs and I'd done a bit of work in a boat shed but I thought I've got a year of university left to go and I've got to boost my CV a little bit with some corporate experience. What I did was, I went through all the different internships that were out there at the time, and the Lloyds one stood out as one of the better ones to me and I applied to it. The main motivation really behind it was just to strengthen my CV and improve my employment opportunities down the line.

My perceptions of banking prior to doing the summer internship were: looking at a computer screen, doing excel spreadsheets all day, not very people orientated and fairly mundane. You're probably asking why I applied for that job then, it was because I'd spoken to other friends that had also done internships in other banks and they'd said it would be a really good opportunity. I really thought that some background in finance would be really strong and help my employment opportunities having done a business degree.

So that's how I went into it and then once I was there what I realised was that there was quite a lot more to banking than I actually thought. It's much more people-oriented, so the amount of time spent in front of a screen is much less. You're in meetings, chatting to the person opposite to you, for me that was a really good insight. The second insight for me was that there is a lot more to banking than just finance. My internship was in Group Security and Fraud. That was a really interesting part of the bank because it's something that I didn't really know existed, or how it worked. In a bank as big as Lloyds which is so important to the UK economy, security and fraud is a really big issue. So actually seeing that first hand having had no prior banking or business experience was really valuable.

The most memorable part of the internship that stood out for me was the final week in which I was the Executive Assistant to the Director of Group Security and Fraud. It was a bit daunting because there's obviously quite a lot of pressure, you've got to deal with the requests that you're given, at short notice and you've got to do it well, because if there's a panel or a meeting that's taking place you need to have the papers ready, take the minutes properly and give feedback afterwards.

The pressure was on, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences of the internship and ultimately that really pushed me towards ultimately accepting the graduate job at Lloyds.