What shouldn't I do? What about communications?
Think very carefully about the emails and all written communication you send out. The banks you intern at hope that you have a great time during your internship, but they're not all-forgiving in the interest of a good time. This is especially true for your analyst bosses and fellow interns. If you do something immensely stupid, pompous, or uncouth, and you're stupid enough to put it in writing and send it to multiple people, you can expect to find yourself on Dealbreaker or Snopes:
As you can see, Miss Gao chose to invite a very select group of people to her birthday extravaganza. Apparently she didn't choose a select enough group of people, however. At least one person thought the whole world (and by the whole world, we mean one other intern, who then probably shared it with his or her intern friends, then an analyst caught wind of it, and all of a sudden you're being copied/pasted by analysts around the world) needed to see the invitation. Make sure you don't put anything this pompous in writing, especially not electronically. The second email is of another foolish young fellow who felt the need to share his newly-found royal status with all of his friends. That's great, but then when your friends want to share how awesome their friend is with their other friends, you end up getting fired from your dream job at The Carlyle Group.
This concludes our "What Not to Do" Series. For now. Please don't make these mistakes. Some of them were foolish and made in the heat of the moment, others were meticulously planned. Either way, they hurt the candidate badly. These are just examples of people getting screwed over before they even get started with their career. At least they had the chance to bounce back. Imagine finding your dream job, being with a company for ten years, making VP/MD, starting a family, and buying a house. Now imaging having your firm find out you lied about an internship, a second major, or something similar. Now you're out of a job, possibly being sued for fraud, you can't pay your $70,000 per year mortgage, you definitely can't afford that pretty new Audi A6 you just bought, and your name isn't good for anything. That's when you realize how badly you really screwed up.
What Not to Do Series:
