So pretty simple, are the hours expected out of you for an unpaid internship roughly the same as what they would expect than if it was a paid internship?
For the fall/winter since I struck out for the summer I'm thinking I should approach places saying that I would do an unpaid internship during the semester, but I'll be in school full time and likely won't be able to work crazy hours.
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My philosophy on the unpaid internship, having done a few myself, is that the only purpose it serves is to slap something on your resume so that you can recruit for more competitive / paid opportunities down the line. I leveraged my first unpaid internship in financial services, unrelated to IB, into a paid boutique IB internship later on.
So I think the answer to your question is no, the expectations are not the same, and if they are then f**k them, because they're not paying you to hustle X amount of hours a week. That being said, do a good job for a reference down the line. Furthermore, you should probably be beyond the unpaid internship "stage" in your junior year and should be at a competitive enough position, experience wise, to recruit for BBs // paid internships in whatever you're going for.
If you are past your junior summer with no SA on your resume, I think the odds are heavily against you taking an unpaid internship. It's probably pretty damn hard to convert an unpaid INTERNSHIP, where you are not getting compensated for your work, into a paid full-time JOB. Those that can't/ won't pay you are generally not the ones willing to hire you full time.
I'm even worse off than that. I'm going to be finishing my MBA in May of 2016 without an IB internship, just some IB work on the side with a guy I work with although I've been in the finance field for the past two years.
Are you at a relatively well-ranked school? You probably know the drill--monitor your on-campus recruiting / job posting site like a hawk-- monitor that shit 24/7. At my target school, our OCR job-site has an option that auto-alerts you every morning by email about all relevant jobs and internships. This was extremely useful for me.
Also, obviously continue to build and extend your network & reach out to alumni between this May and next May. These are relatively common pieces of advice you will find here, nothing extraordinary. If you want something a little more outside the box, if its an option, perhaps consider delaying graduation by a year (spreading your classes & going less than full time) in order to get another shot at summer recruiting. Some people do this at the undergraduate level to get another shot at summers, but I don't know how viable that is at the MBA level, both financially and time-wise. If your program allows you to go part-time, this would probably be your strongest chance, probability wise, of landing a banking job out of school.
If you don't mind me asking, why were you unable to get an IB internship anywhere at all? As an MBA student, this should be your single, 100% all-out goal the entire year leading up to your first summer. I think to have no summer as an MBA student is a pretty huge red flag. Did you only apply to BBs? Do you have finance related pre-MBA experience?
Finally, obviously it goes without saying, but you have to do SOMETHING this summer to put on you resume, and in your position even with an unpaid internship I would stop at nothing in my search to upgrade this summer, even if its too late, and build on whatever you can get between now and next May. Good luck.
I go to Fordham, although not a top it was ~50 when I accepted and they had a decent program with a lot more recruiting and the like. This year, they were completely unranked and fell off the radar. At their career fair in the fall they had... 8 companies I think? 1 of them was an investment bank and it didn't even show up. So as far as OCR goes, I thought I would do the BB banks that way, which obviously didn't pan out, so then I was stuck to cold email and calling, which I did and got nothing really there. Even a couple friends that work in Am and ER at them weren't able to get me anywhere.
I check my OCR, LinkedIn, and even the bottom of the barrel craigslist every single day to see if there is anything new that would work. We just got a new head of OCR that has a large IB background, so I'm hoping she can leverage some contacts and get some banks to OCR soon.
I've been working a commodities trading job since July of 2013, so I'm doing something finance related. I also work on the side with a guy and we do IB stuff, so I have some IB and finance related things on my resume.
Pre MBA though I was a computer science undergrad so I don't have any IB related experience in undergrad, just some PWM stuff I did in undergrad to test the waters.
I probably could have gotten an unpaid summer internship that could have led to a full time offer, but I need a paying job so that rent can get paid, but in the fall I will be in a position to where I can do an unpaid gig.
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