This post was written by Victoria Hayes who had a placement year with the Bank of England. She describes her experience and gives great advice on why communicating with your manager and team is important.
I completed my placement year at the Bank of England in the Fraud Detection Services department. When I started at BoE, I was very overwhelmed as there was a lot of complex server technology that confused me and so many acronyms which I thought I would never understand. I was unsure when emails applied to me as I was entered into a team email chain often and I found that I was the youngest team member by 20 years. My first three months were very overwhelming but by my fourth month it started to click, and I began to understand the terminology, emails made sense and the team culture was more open and inclusive. It took a while for me to settle in and I think the best advice I can give you is to feedback on how you are feeling to your manager. Being open and talking to everyone is also very important as personal relationships are key in large businesses. I found grasping the technology rather difficult at first but then I started to use internal sources to gain a broader information grasp and it became clearer. I was lucky enough to enter with around 30 other placement students and BoE started to feel a lot more like home when all of us placement students created a little group and became friends. I also learnt very quickly that it is important to plan weekend events to make sure you get a break and do some active activities to break up the weeks. Taking Holidays are also very important and remember to take your leave days as often as placement students we cannot carry them over to the next year!