Placement Chapter - Marked as Done

As I’m writing this, I’m on my first flight taken in the last 8 months. I didn’t have a proper holiday ever since Christmas, and now I’m finally going home to see my family again. This is the story of how my Morgan Stanley journey ends.

Ever since Friday, my last day with the firm, I needed some time to gather my thoughts and look back at the past 14 months. 

When I think about how everything started, I realise I don’t have “last summer” stories because my placement kicked off right after the exams in my second-year. But the London life was so thrilling ever since the beginning, that time started flying by faster than I would’ve thought. 

So I spent that summer meeting other interns, discovering London’s culinary gems with them and eventually creating long-lasting friendships. But when September came and they all left, I started seeing what being a full time employee actually feels like - more work & less events. The results? After my first 6 months in a back-office team, I managed to build a full-stack application using technologies that I was learning on the fly. When 2020 started, I moved to a front-office team, developing Microsoft Office add-ins for bankers (and again learning everything on the go).

However, no matter how exciting my work was & regardless of the steep learning curve I experienced (or how during this year I learned more than I ever did in a university year), it was always the people around me that gave me that eagerness to step into the office each morning. If I’d start naming them, I’d only stop 3 scrolls down. But I was surrounded by amazing mentors, knowledgeable managers and people that were always there to help and offer you a smile. I got really emotional when leaving each of the teams because I realised how lucky I was to have had the chance to meet and work with such people.

And then the pandemic started. And we all switched to working from home. And some may have thought “I didn’t sign up for an online internship”. But no one did sign up for this... all of this. Yet those people that I was talking about earlier, they were still there. Perhaps not a shoulder tap away anymore, but a click or a call away. 5 months of WFH later, I finished my placement without any proper goodbyes or farewell, but with the people I worked with cherishing the work I’ve done over 20 odd sprints. And one of the best feelings is seeing your work appreciated and widely used, from the business analysts bookmarking my configuration tool for daily use, to the bankers and stakeholders that reached out to me to compliment the increase in productivity brought to them by the features I built.

If you got this far with the read, here’s me wrapping up: I feel extremely grateful for this year and what I have accomplished (especially with all the unforseen circumstances), and I know that I wouldn’t have been here, a year later, with so many milestones to be proud of, without the people mentioned before. So cheers to them, cheers to new experiences, cheers to being scared of starting your first job & cheers to finishing it more confident than ever. I always considered the placement to be a “trial to adulthood”, but I got so much more out of it (especially learning that “it’s the people that make the place”). So if you’re a second-year that’s still considering doing a placement year, trust me: it’s going to be so worth it (even during a pandemic).

P.S.: Here’s first-year me excited for the Tech Spring Week at MS. Then on the right there’s third-year me excited to have been a placement intern for a year. Morale of the story: stay excited, who knows what the future holds in for you?