Opportunities for internships in Seattle?

I'm from Seattle and I've looked at the UW job board and tried finding internships there for my sophomore summer. It's pretty bad overall... You can try Russell Investments, Safeco Insurance, potentially microsoft, amazon, boeing, paccar or other corpfin stuff. Might be some Big 4 stuff too.

If you're attending UW i suspect your best bet is cold calling hedge funds and asking for some unpaid work. Saw a resume on razume from a UW kid who got Goldman IBD, but personally, if i went to UW, i wouldn't be in finance today. Best of luck to you.

I lived in Seattle for quite some time, and Ravenous is right. The Pacific Northwest is almost exclusively tech and manufacturing, and it's colleges cater to the medical field. It's just a few notches above Iowa and Kansas in terms of relativity to finance. Incubators and Accelerators are starting to take a hold on that city, so unless you're really smart or ready to network coal to gold don't go to UW my man.

Just playing devil's advocate. Considering you're a college senior, you are two steps ahead of most non-target kids just by knowing what IB is. If you manage to score a respectable freshman year gig in Seattle (unpaid at HF?), and aggressively network by taking trips to NYC, you should be able to land something. I did a quick Google search and there are a couple boutiques in Seattle, good landing spot for sophomore year. That would be a solid résumé. So some form of PWM/Small HF job freshman year, Seattle IB Boutique sophomore year, 3.8+ GPA, and aggressive networking should set you up decently for junior year recruiting. Of course, all that being said, even something like Fordham / Baruch sets you up better for banking.

I guess piggybacking from the q&a written by havardalum08 recarding corpdev in tech, could a UW student get recruited for Amazon, Starbucks, or MS corpdev out of UG?

Look at Cascadia Capital, DA Davidson, Mcadams wright ragen. There are a handful of boutiques out there. Cascadia is probably the biggest in the region and best known. They have hired interns, grads from UW in the past. If you really want to do BB banking though I'd highly advise going elsewhere (most Cal schools would be way better). Only 2 or 3 guys from UW make it to wall street every year and they are very well qualified either way.

Yeah I forgot about Cascadia -- they're supposed to be okay for investment banking. And there are 1-2 very small private equity firms.

The corpdev idea is respectable and Microsoft and Expedia are good options for that too. I don't know if they hire out of undergrad though.

Vulcan Capital and Cascade Investments would be pretty cool opportunities.

Don't go to UW if you can. There are a couple of kids from UW that get BB or MBB jobs but they have at least two of the following: i) top 1% of Foster class ( valedictorian went to BAML) ii) insane family connections that can use to network directly or through PWM or iii) great personalities and insane networkers. I am guessing you have at least the third one since you are starting early.

As for corporate development jobs , also very unlikely. Most corp Dev jobs hire out of bulge brackets or top mba programs . My brother works in corp Dev and all his peers came from BB and top schools ( ivy or stanford , Berkeley etc.)

You can try to do one of the local banks ( Moss Adams , Cascadia, duff and phelps but not sure if that is what you want.)

Another route could be to do valuation work ( Thorthon something) and then transfer to corp Dev or the small PE funds in the area, I have seen this done).

Overall if you can somewhere else go somewhere with more recruiting if your goal is to go to a BB but very difficult to be done out of UW unless you are the cream of the crop. ( there is also the big 4 consulting arms which do hire at UW )

Source: seattle native

Bro, UW sort of sucks for finance.

THAT BEING SAID

If you go there, you can REALLY STAND OUT by interning at a VC fund. I also know of a few PE firms in Seattle.

Seattle Northwest Securities had an internship opportunity that was posted recently. It was on the asset management side of things so I'm not sure if that would help you at all. Still it would be a way to get experience in the business.

Yeah but the fact that Vulcan is active does not help you. Look at their website , only one UW guy and he does fund of funds.

I had the same choice to make and I did not go UW. I came to a liberal arts college in upstate NY. But my first year internship was in Seattle. Some random thoughts:

If you have the mind for NYC then expect pains in the ass.

They used to have WaMu but it is gone. Don't expect to be hired by BB's local office. If you network hard and have connections you might be able to get into the institutional equity or something like it in a BB.

Seattle does have some boutiques. Moss Adams and SNW as people have mentioned. The former is a legit boutique. The latter is more of an asset mgmt house and does a lot of debt offering and underwriting stuff for local institutions.

Seattle is a huge place for PWM. You find opportunities easily in that area. Bellevue is sort of big in HF/PE. Not Stamford kind of big.

In Foster if you do well then you are pretty much set for Russell. Otherwise corpfin or corpdev at msft, sbux, amzn are legit as well.

What are the hedge funds in Bellevue?

There's the fish / creek something type name one. I forgot. They have a billion in AUM. There's a Japan one in Kirkland too but I forgot the name of them as well. I would say Greenwich > Stamford > Marin >....... (long ass distance)........ Bellevue as far as satellite HF-centric areas.

Anyway, it's just not a real finance city for front office analytical experience. I grew up in part in Seattle and I've been head hunted a couple of times for various firms there, and they always just seem very Busch league compared to SF- and NYC-based funds. I'd love to move back at some point, but not worth it for a step down.

I don't think Russell's a great option since it's not very transferable to most of the rest of the industry and the career progression there is very slow from what I've heard. It's an option, but if you have what it takes to break into IB or a HF job, you would be settling at Russell.

Bottom line, with Seattle, if you can even get in anywhere, you are locked in for 5-10 years before the next Seattle-based opportunity is likely to come along. You can't easily move every 2-3 years like you can in other cities because there are few jobs and even less turnover. It's a lifestyle city, basically.

Not trying to be overly negative, it's a great place to live, but not if you are serious about finance.

Any comments on Cascadia, particularly for a sophomore internship? Seems like there's a lot of people who know a decent amount about it.

Not sure about banking, but I know BCG and McKinsey opened their Seattle offices (fairly) recently, and both recruit pretty heavily.

I know nothing of the subject, but do know that Pacific Crest Securities is in (near) Portland. Where do they recruit? Nobody from UW goes there?

^I can only comment on Pac Crest because I'm from the PNW. From what I've seen, Pacific Crest has a very non-traditional recruiting process. They seem to hire/offer interviews to people who actively reach out to them versus people who just apply online when the jobs get posted. They've hired from my undergrad in the past (I went to a non-target btw), but the people who got jobs did it by networking, building relationships with people over time, and then performing well in the interviews.

I think it's the same for DA Davidson, another good-sized investment bank in the PNW. I had to actively seek out both of these firms in the past, and that's how I got interviews; not just by applying online.