Pre-Investment Banking Internship: Calling all freshmen and sophomores

January has arrived bringing a new year, new semester, and the pre-IB internship dash. IB recruiting has gotten really competitive. At the top-tier BB IB I worked at as an analyst we filled all our SA spots with candidates who had previous finance experience. Talk to anyone at a BB IB and they’ll tell you that the most successful SA candidates have some sort of previous finance experience. What does “finance experience” mean? Private Equity, Hedge Fund, Wealth Management, and corporate finance are the most common. How do you beat the odds and land one of these internships in the summer between your sophomore and junior years? Read on . . .

I remember reading WSO in college and always thought the personal stories were the best. I’ll try to keep this as specific as possible. Draw your own conclusions and apply them to your situation.

I was a late bloomer. I went to college (target school) knowing I wanted to do something in business. I didn’t decide on finance until my sophomore year, and as winter turned into spring of my sophomore year, having missed all OC pre-IB internship recruiting, I finally realized that I needed an internship that summer. This is important: even though I went to a target school I hadn’t taken advantage of any of the Wall Street oriented clubs or any of the on-campus recruiting support. Given how late I realized I was going to want to recruit for IB SA spots the following year, the only advantage I got from my target school for the pre-IB process was the school’s name; it was going to take some serious networking to pull this off.

As if my procrastination wasn’t bad enough, I had already signed up to study abroad in the fall in Rome. I had already booked my flights and was going to be leaving for Europe mid-way through the summer, precluding me from taking any internships that followed a normal 10 week summer schedule. Studying abroad in the fall also meant that I was going to miss all of the on-campus BB IB SA recruiting. The situation was bleak, and it took me a few days to motivate myself to try to beat the odds.

I spent the first day in the “spin room” as I call it. I thought about everything I had gotten involved with in college, found a few IB Resume templates, picked one I liked, and started spinning some tangentially finance-related experiences into something usable.

The next day I started googling – I needed a list of all possible finance-related companies in my hometown where I would be for the first half of summer, and a list of all finance-related companies in Rome where I would be for the following 5 months. I wish I could say that I organized the information in excel (this would’ve been an awesome idea), but alas I hadn’t learned the ways of the Jedi yet. I pulled out a pen and a legal pad and started making a list of companies.

Over the next two days, using an email template I had written earlier, I sent ~300 emails to all of the companies whose names I had written on the list. Stop reading for a minute and try to guess what my response rate was . . .

20%? 10%? 5%? 1%?

Even lower – I received two responses. One of those responses was an assistant graciously telling me they weren’t interested. The other response was from a Private Equity firm in Rome that wanted to schedule an interview. After sending 300 emails I had gotten one interview. I spent the next few days learning everything I could about the partner I’d be speaking with, brushing up on my Italian, and learning about the firm’s target investment industries.

I had been imagining an organized interview, but when I phoned the partner he was in a cab on the way to a hotel in Madrid in a torrential downpour. The phone call dropped three times, but it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the phone call he offered me an internship and told me to check in once I arrived in Rome.

The internship was incredible! I made friends with my co-workers, significantly improved my Italian, and had an amazing internship to talk about when I returned to the US in the spring. This pre-IB internship set me apart from all the other students who were fighting over a small number of OC IB SA opportunities in the spring, and I still get questions about the experience to this day.

So what are the “key takeaways?” Pre-IB internship recruiting is going to be really difficult. That said, if you get organized, work on spinning your experience into a usable resume, prep for your interviews, and send enough emails you will get an internship, and that internship will help you out with IB SA recruiting next year.

John B. is a Wall Street Mentor with Wall Street Oasis. Over the past two years he has mentored freshmen, sophomores, and juniors at universities around the country helping them earn Investment Banking internships at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Moelis, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and others. To request John B.’s help with resume reviews, networking, or interview prep purchase one of the Wall Street Mentor packages on Wall Street Oasis and request him on your post-sign up questionnaire.