Portfolio Management Intern

I applied through on campus recruiting near the end of their drop deadline and received an on campus interview a few weeks later. 1st round was all fit, nothing on the markets, and nothing on accounting or valuation. Knowing your resume was the key to doing well in the interview, as they tried to stress test me on various points of it to make sure that I was serious. They wanted to also make sure that you had done the research on their company and so I was asked questions about where their company was located and what it is that it did. They really wanted you to understand what their business and what Cigna was all about., so definitely go through the job description and their website well.

The 1st round interview was fairly easy and a couple weeks later, I had gotten a notification that I had gotten a second (and last) round interview at their headquarters. This was a super day interview where you would interview with 5 people in a variety of areas including research, real estate, portfolio management, etc. It seemed like there was a flat structure between all of these divisions and that it is possible to move from one division to another. So "fit" in a division seemed to be the most important factor in getting placement into it as opposed to one division being significantly harder to get into than another. Questions were mostly fit - "walk me through your resume", "tell me about yourself", "greatest strength/weakness", "time when you worked in a team", etc , etc , etc. Additionally there were questions specific to the division - had some questions about real estate, hypothetical case - study like questions, market questions "where do you see the dow heading".

It was mostly to see how you fit and whether you knew some basic things about finance. Very little came up about my extracurricular activities or school, it was all about describing past work experience and answering the fit questions. Be enthusiastic about the interview, otherwise they will question you harder suspecting a lack of interest.

In terms of my impressions, during the super day it became clear to me that the culture and position wasn't a great fit for what I wanted to do. The firm's portfolio management operation was relatively small and the company was just looking to hire 1-2 interns for the summer to help out. The work would not involve financial modeling or other valuable, transferrable skills for the world of high finance. During the interview I was also told that there was no guarantee of being recruited for a FT position after having done the internship which all but convinced me to look at other options. I ended up not receiving an offer, but wouldn't have accepted even if I had did. I'm not sure if Cigna recruits in this way for all schools but it did it this way for my school (non target). Also the work culture is very professional, very strict, and it didn't seem like a friendly, collegial place. This was definitely not what I was looking for, being a college student who would want to work with and learn and compete alongside other students/recent grads as opposed to being at an office dominated my older professionals.