Analyst Intern

I applied for the summer internship position through my career center website in February. After a month I received en e-mail requesting me to answer several essay questions:

1. Please provide a brief description (in your own words) of the difference between an equity mutual fund and an equity-oriented hedge fund.
2. Please provide a description of the evolution of the financial markets in the past five years (in 500 words or less) noting the causes and effects.
3. Please develop a table containing the names of the top ten independent wealth management firms in Southern California, noting assets under management for each as of the most recent date available. Please also list any sources you consulted as part of this research project.

After sending over my responses, I received another e-mail a couple weeks later asking me to sign up for an in-person interview. However, due to a conflict, we rescheduled for a phone interview instead. The phone interview consisted of two 30-45 minute interviews with two people. The first interview consisted of mainly behavioral questions such as:

What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Tell me about a time when you demonstrated leadership.
Walk me through your resume.
Why do you want to intern at our firm?
Why investment banking?

The second interview consisted of technical questions such as:

What is enterprise value?
Walk me through a DCF.
How does a depreciation of 10 affect the 3 financial statements (assume a tax rate of 40%)?

After the interview, there was time for me to ask any questions I had. Overall, the interview was straight forward and there weren't a lot of difficult or tricky questions. My advice would be to prepare for basic behavioral questions and technical questions from the various interview guides out there and you should be fine.