I Fell Victim To Wheel Spinning As An IB Intern. Here Are 10 Efficiency Tips To Get Things Right The First Time During IB Internship

The biggest challenge I faced as an intern was finding the balance between…

• Exhausting my resources to “take a stab” making a full-effort first attempt &
• Asking my associate for help earlier to avoid wasting time spinning wheels

…when given a task that I had no clue how to approach.

Throughout the summer, I became close with an analyst that fortunately showed me some of the tricks he used as an intern to get tasks done faster and right the first time.

I wanted to pass them forward to help you land that return this summer with confidence.

1) Ask For Well-Done Examples to Mock

If it’s a task you’ve never done before, you can politely ask if they have any good examples of a well-done version of something similar in the shared drive.

Then, you can trace formulas and mock the clean formatting of that polished example to get it done right the first time.

2) Ask As Many Questions On Front End As Possible

He showed me how he has built the habit of visualizing a plan of attack when given a task.

Doing this helps uncover questions / clarification details that would’ve come up while further into the assignment. Instead of being a bother coming back every hour to ask follow-ups, you can ask them from the start.

3) Keep Mistake Notebook

This is to avoid making the same mistake twice. He kept a notebook with the sole purpose of tracking mistakes.

He’d log comments received from deal teams and review at the end of each week.

4) Print & Highlight Comments

Printing helps avoid the extra round of comments from basic mistakes.

For some reason it becomes 10x more obvious if you forgot to reflect a comment or if boxes aren’t aligned / something is misspelled / numbers don’t tie when printed.

5) Leverage Past Materials

The shared drive is your best friend. It’s a sea of old files that will likely have something similar to what you’re working on. You can reference those to avoid manually creating items from scratch.

Digging through it or asking colleagues if they know where a similar file is located is a major time saver.

6) Bobsled Analysts

In any down time between comments, he advised pulling up a chair to an analyst you work closely with to watch for 15-20min how they complete tasks.

You’ll be surprised how much you learn from taking note of shortcuts they use, saving habits, etc.

7) Archive & Save Frequently

Before going in to edit a file, save up a version so if you completely corrupt the file and can’t fix it, you have the previous version to fall back on.

Nothing worse than having to completely re-start something you spent 2hr on. Save frequently.

8) Build Your “Shelf”

He had a folder titled “references” with well-done examples of deliverables that he had to re-create frequently. Instead of starting from scratch with new assignments, he’d just open a new version of the reference and populate it with the new task’s info.

9) Setup Macros / Keyboard Shortcuts

Everyone has their own preferences. He advised asking an analyst you are close with what they use and spend the extra 20min at the end of the first week to get it set up.

10) Remove F1 Key

I didn’t realize how much tracing is done in excel figuring out how certain things are being calculated.

When you’re tracing, you use F2 and ESC repeatedly to trace and then get out and move to another cell. F1 gets in the way, so you can pop it out of the keyboard to avoid the frustration of accidentally hitting it.

Use these tips and you’ll get things right the first time and avoid that extra round of comments. Good luck this summer - you're gonna kill it!