Graduate Schemes

Commercial Banking Graduate Scheme

We help U.K. -based clients to invest locally and trade globally, and advise them on ways they can manage risk. To apply for our scheme, you need a 2:1 degree or above in any discipline from any university.

Location: Our graduate schemes are based in various cities around the U. K., including London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bristol.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

◆Attending client meetings to understand their needs and offering solutions to support them.

◆Managing the Group's exposure to risk and assessing investment opportunities.

Risk Management Graduate Scheme

If you are eager to learn how a national organization protects itself and its customers from different threats, you'll be a great fit for our Risk Management teams. What you need is just a 2: 2 degree or above.

Location: The first placement will be in Bristol, followed by three placements in London.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

◆Developing your understanding of credit risks, risk analysis and financial modeling.

◆Using artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify our risk management processes.

Finance Graduate Scheme

Finance teams are the trusted advisors to our business. And, once they understand how a business works, they can develop strategies that help transform it, within a fastchanging industry.

Accounting and finance graduates are qualified for this scheme.

Location: London.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

◆Building relationships with colleagues and customers to better understand their needs.

◆Reviewing our practices and contributing ideas on the ways we can improve them.

Manufacturing Graduate Scheme

We're the U. K is second latest fresh food manufacturer. We're unique in the way we source and make most of our fresh food ourselves. To join us, it's crucial that you have a driving license. Besides, you must have a passion for food quality and safety. Those who have a minimum 2: 2 degree and are fluent in Chinese will be preferred.

Location: Longon.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

◆Working with a variety of teams at several of our manufacturing sites.

◆Going on placement in stores to learn more about our retail operations.

What is art? That's an easy question to answer. Art is a painting, a drawing or a sculpture. Now there are new items to add to the list. Art is a dead shark in a glass case. Art is an unmade bed. Art is a video of a group of people standing completely still for sixty minutes.

A new group of young artists began to produce work that challenged the accepted idea of what art is and the role the artist should play in society. This group came to be known as the YBAs—the Young British Artists. The art of the YBAs does not just stick to painting and sculpture. It uses all kinds of different materials to express the feeling of the artist.

Damien Hirst is the most famous of the YBAs. The shark in the box is his work and is meant to express his own fear of dying. The shark stands for death. Right now, it is harmless. But eventually it will come for you. There is nothing to be done about it.

Traditionally, artists have a message. They use their skills to lead us to enlightenment (启迪). The message of the YBAs is that they cannot do this. They are just as mixed up and confused as everybody else. A journalist once asked Damien Hirst what his next idea was for an artwork. “I don't know what I'm going to do next. I never know what I'm going to do next,” he replied.

Another YBA, Tracy Emin recently produced a work called “Bed”. This is just her own bed with the sheets disarranged and dirty. And the message? “Look at me—I'm a mess.”

Some artists work with the public in producing their work. Gillian Wearing filmed a group of people dressed as policemen trying to keep still for 60 minutes while standing on top of a table. At the end of that time, the table falls apart and everyone falls to the floor. You can try to be a good citizen and a respectable member of the community. But don't try too hard or the pressure will be too much.

Art mirrors the state of society. In the work of the YBAs we can see a society on the threshold (开端) of the future—a bit worried, a bit excited and wondering what is going to happen next. The YBAs can't guide us, but they can make the journey more interesting.

After spending years competing as a marathon mountain runner and cross-country skier, Gudrun Pflueger devoted herself to tracking wolves as a field biologist in Canada’s backcountry.

And her research and encounters with the Canadian coastal wolves led to the 2010 Smithsonian Channel documentary (纪录片) A Woman Among Wolves.

Less than a month after filming along British Columbia's islands, Pflueger, then 33, was diagnosed with a brain tumor (瘤) and told she might have only 18 months to live.

Surgeons removed a golf ball-size tumor, and Pflueger, now promoting her Smithsonian Channel follow-up, Running With Wolves, credits wolves with helping inspire her recovery.

“I really believe the encounter with the wolves in the wilderness was a powerful medicine. They gave me strength,” says Pflueger, now 37, whose life-threatening encounter with a coastal wolf pack was highlighted in the earlier film.

“Most people see them as bad, as killing machines. But they are part of nature. They have some of the same characteristics as we do—determination, courage, a strong will to live.

Running With Wolves was filmed over parts of 2011-2012, while Pflueger was regaining her physical strength. It tracks her inspirational but hard return to Canada's coast.

“It’s rare for filmmakers to go back, but people can relate to this story on all sorts of levels,” says Smithsonian Channel’s chief programmer, David Royle. “Gudrun was a world-class athlete who is fun and energetic. She’s enthusiastic about a species that's been misrepresented. And you come away feeling inspired by her courage and bravery recovering from cancer.”

“We want to draw attention to women scientists. They’re underrepresented at the top level,” he says. “We also wanted to challenge stereotypes (成见) that women scientists are unimportant.”

A new study, published in Psychological Science, finds that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.

“One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable (可塑的) and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes,” says Jason S. Moser, of Michigan State University. Studies have found that people who think intelligence is malleable say things like, “When the going gets tough, I put in more effort.” or “If I make a mistake, I try to learn and figure it out.” On the other hand, people who think that they can't get smarter will not take opportunities to learn from their mistakes. This can be a problem in school. For example, a student who thinks her intelligence is fixed will think it's not worth bothering to try harder after she fails a test.

For this study, Moser and his colleagues gave participants a task that was easy to make a mistake on. They were supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM”, “MMNMM” or “NNMNN”. Sometimes the middle letter was the same as the other four, and sometimes it was different.

While doing the task, the participants wear a cap on his or her head that records electrical activity in the brain. When someone makes a mistake, their brain makes two quick signals: an initial response that indicates something has gone wrong—the “Oh, crap” response, as Moser calls it—and a follow-up signal that indicates an attempt to correct the mistake.

A bigger second signal was displayed in the participants who were better able to recover from making a mistake—that is, those who believed that they could learn from such a mistake—than in the participants who had negative feelings about a mistake and believed that their failure was due to their own shortcomings.

“This research might help us understand why exactly the two types of individuals show different behaviors after mistakes and could help in training people to believe that they can work harder and learn more, by showing how their brain is reacting to mistakes,” Moser says.