How do I get a finance internship...of ANY kind?

There are all different kinds of finance jobs in the windy city. Start with your schools recruiting website and look for alumni in the city. The fact that you will be an easy interview (they wont need to fly you in from somewhere) will work in your favor. Also, try to find some smaller/start-up places that are hiring. I am a huge fans of candidates who workup ed at smaller/start-up jobs at some point because they got to work closely with senior level people and had a good variation in what they were doing each day.

Well I'm trying to be as realistic as possible. Chicago does in fact have a huge financial sector, and there are many many options. In my case, I have good quantitative and (I'd like to think) decent qualitative skills as well. On the other hand, I haven't taken any accounting/finance courses nor have I any experience in analyzing financial statements or the like. So in other words I have a lot of potential but not many applicable skills ATM. That's fine for a target school person, but for someone from UIC not so good I think. So, with that in mind, can anyone suggest a particular type of internship or firm I should be looking at and have a realistic chance of gettting? Cause right now I'm a bit clueless.

See what your schools resources are. When I was looking for places I talked to my advisors first. They can point in the right direction, or many even give you some contacts. Also if you go through your school and they put you in touch with an alum, that can really help your chances.

Assuming that your career center has good staffs.. to get started I'd go there and talk to one of the advisers about your situations. You sound really enthusiastic about getting into finance. That would probably show and work for you.

They probably also know all the ways to locate alumni in the field. Even if you have access to the network/search, they might have a few things to teach you about how to get the most results out of your network.

Last but not least- use the search feature on this forum. A lot of people have posted something similar to yours.

I'm not much help otherwise.

Local PWM type internships. Many places like RBC, Wachovia, MS, UBS, etc have local offices spread around the country to handle PWM, retail investing and other types of positions. These internships, while obviously not even on the same level as going to a big city and getting a normal IB internship, look good on your resume and can be a good stepping stone. They are usually found through local school papers and career centers after the summer IB recruiting season. Sometimes it's best to network with wealthy friends and find out what retail bank they use and see if they can help get you in. Remember, these are low paying internships to get your foot in the door.

With your lack of qualifications etc, this will at least give you some market type exposure by reading research and beef up your resume for the next time around.

If you want to be competitive in the long term though, since you don't have the backing of a target you need to increase your proactiveness with regards to classes, jobs, etc. Take the accounting and finance classes, TA for a corporate finance class, keep the internship through the year if possible, etc.

Thanks to all the responses. In fact, about the only big bank that wants to have anything at all to do with this school is UBS PWM, they actually come and recruit for internships. They had a recruiting session for the spring semester in the fall, so I expect they'll be coming again soon for the summer. As far as PWM internships are concerned, what are they about? I hope not just about cold calling?  Do they actuallly let you do analysis  and research, or are you just sitting there cold calling and making copies?

don't get your hopes up about doing research and analysis because chances are you won't.  experiences at these PWM offices vary by office...sometimes they give the interns more responsibility and sometimes you are just stuck doing filing.  but i think given what you have said, you don't really have the option of being picky.

yo felix...i sent you a PM

Something in Corp Finance with a big name is very helpful. I go to a non-target, got an internship summer after soph year as a Finance Intern with a Fortune 10 company. With some decent alums, got SA interviews with GS,UBS,JPM,ML,Lazard and a bunch others.

Internship was pretty easy to get, and a great experience that I talked about in all of my interviews.