The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City. It offers services in investment management, securities, asset management, prime brokerage, and securities underwriting.
For International Women’s Day (IWD), Goldman Sachs (London Office) organised an open day on Saturday 7th March 2020 for school aged girls (years 10-13) interested in a career in IT. Out of approximately 800 people who applied, only the 100 (roughly) that were present were accepted. I attended this event in Central London and it was absolutely remarkable.
Central London is a huge place and it can be easy to get lost sometimes. This was exactly what happened to me! My mother and I walked out of City Thameslink station assuming that the walk to Goldman Sachs would only be around 10 minutes. However, we ended up walking around Central London for over an hour in search of the building. As we were walking, we saw other families, mothers and daughters who also seemed to be looking for the same place. Eventually, we navigated our way to the building with the help of a business receptionist who kindly led us to the building. When I saw the building, I was so overjoyed. After trekking for over an hour, I was happy that all of the strain had paid off and on the positive side, we got in some extra exercise.
I walked through the revolving doors and received my name badge from one of the Goldman Sachs employees. Everything felt so official and professional. Around me, I saw many other girls like myself who were really excited. Due to the current pandemic that we are in, it is mandatory that hand sanitiser is used by people entering a workplace and Goldman Sachs is no different. I used the hand sanitiser and went through the gates. A huddle of us were escorted to a huge hall where an array of laptops was set up for us and I was directed to a seat.
The prestigious event comprised of learning how to code in a programming language that was new to me - Open Processing. I am a Computer Science GCSE student and as opposed to Open Processing, we use Python. Therefore, it was quite interesting for me to come out of my comfort zone and learn something new. On my table, I was the youngest as the other four people who surrounded me were in Years 11,12 or 13. Despite the differences in age, as a table, we all helped each other when we were struggling .
People from across Europe came to this event; one girl even came from France just for the event! There were two American speakers who spoke to everyone about getting an IT career in the future, informed us of the benefits of computing skills that would still be useful in later life even if we didn’t want to pursue a career in IT and assisted us in coding . As well as this, we were told about different opportunities that we could have at Goldman Sachs such as work experience, apprenticeships and much, much more.
During our break, we were presented with a buffet whereby we could pick anything we wanted. The refreshments were quite high-class, and I overheard a girl, Mary Allen, saying 'I can't eat this. It's too posh for me!'. But obviously, she seized the opportunity and indulged in the refreshments which she seemed to enjoy.
By the end of the 3-hour session, we had all designed a graphic for a tote bag using Open Processing which would be sent to us via the post. We were also given complementary Goldman Sachs branded notebooks, pens and information blocks.
Thank you to the amazing team at Goldman Sachs who held the event.
By Eve Okubadejo
