How Not To Screw Up An Internship

I saw a lot of interns come and go during my time at the Brothers Lehman. Some were good, some were bad, but honestly, I can’t remember any of them. You know why? Because I had other shit to do than to deal with stupid interns. I was running a giant trading desk with a multi-billion dollar book, and I was spending most of my time plugging holes, trying not to lose money to customers or to sales guys or to errors. When I wasn’t fixing other people’s fuck-ups, I was drinking in a bar or drinking at home. I had very little energy to sit around at teach the futures basis to some kid.

So the first thing you will learn as an intern is that Wall Street folks are primarily self-interested and they don’t really care what you do as long as you stay out of the way. Some of them will even give you a “project” whose sole purpose is to keep you out of the way. Beware the “project.” Nobody really cares whether you do a good job on the project or not. If you sit in a corner working on a project all summer, chances are that when the HR people come around to ask if you should be hired full-time, even if they remember your name, they won’t have an opinion about you.

But the alternative, sitting right next to someone at the desk all day and constantly asking questions for six weeks is a bad idea, too. Unless you are an excellent conversationalist, and you actually know something about the markets (you don’t), this is going to get old fast. So being an intern is all about a good mix of being visible and invisible, and being visible and invisible at the right times.

But here is the key point:

although most financial folks are cranky and insufferable, the one thing they do have in common is that they have a passion for what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting there doing this stressful job for progressively less pay while being called assholes on a daily basis by the financial press. As I’ve traveled around, nobody loves their job more than traders and bankers, even though you’ll never hear a rah-rah speech about it. So, as an intern, if you know enough to ask the right question, that shows that you are informed about what is going on and that you care about the industry, too, then you’ll get me talking and we’ll have a nice conversation. And maybe I will remember your name.

But crucially, the idea is to be informed rather than to sound informed. School is over. This is work time. It’s not like your Organizational Behavior class, where you get docked a grade for every week you hand in a paper late. In my world, if you hand in something a minute late, you’re fired. So you either buy into this career and make it your life, eat, sleep, and breathe it, or you find something else to do, maybe some government job, where your day ends when you get home at 5, and you can leave work at work. So there is no class that you sit in and take notes and write papers and learn about Wall Street. How you learn about it is to immerse yourself in it, like moving to a foreign country, and learning the language. At the end of the summer, the traders and bankers will be able to tell who the pretenders are. The interns that did it right—asked questions and learned and did the work—those folks you could hire them on the spot and just plug and play.

One more thing. It helps if you interact with these people socially. Don’t make a nuisance of yourself, but grab a drink with them every now and then. Wall Street people have some of the most finely tuned social skills you will find anywhere. This is another test. If you can’t be client-facing, there’s not much they can do with you, unless you’re exceptionally talented. I speak from experience.