I REMEMBER my first day in the City vividly — heading to the boardroom to meet the other new graduates in the corporate finance department. Managing directors welcomed us while also warning us that we should not take our positions lightly. ‘For each of you, there were 100 candidates who wanted to be in your seat,’ one said.

For graduates, adjusting to the City begins with the training programme. Classes include accounting, company law, securities, valuation techniques and trading. All programmes end with the dreaded regulatory Securities and Futures Authority (SFA) exams required for all client-facing staff. Fail the SFA three times and your City career is pretty much over.

Once on to the floor, I rotated over a year through a couple of different desks: European Utilities and Equity Capital Markets. It was tough. Even with four months of training, I remained clueless. My first quantitative analysis was passable only because a second-year stayed up with me past midnight correcting all my errors. I got yelled at because I got the order wrong in the recipient list of a memo.

I learnt that the words to fear most are: ‘Do you have some spare capacity?’, particularly if asked at 8pm on a Friday, and that work at 4am is more fun if breaks and target practice — throwing a mini rugby ball at fire exit signs on the trading floor — are shared with another graduate. Amid the mistakes, the learning, the hard work and late nights, there were some truly great professional moments too. I was even asked for advice by a CEO, a veteran of 25 years. For any second-year grad it is hard not to feel that a pretty special experience.

In most jobs, the people with whom you work dictate your experience. In the City, this is doubly so because personalities are more extreme. The City is full of characters, from fast-talking Wall Street bankers to aristocratic English blue bloods, from multilingual continentals to shy mathematical geniuses. They all add colour to the working experience but it is the people directly around you that matter most. A bad boss or a hostile team will destroy your experience; a great boss and a sense of camaraderie will define it.

Hugh Karseras is a director in a City bank and the author of From New Recruit To High Flyer (Kogan Page, £9.99).

Have you worked in the City? Tell us about your experiences: Was it Heaven or Hell?

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