Business Advisor Program (Internship)

I applied to E&Y's penultimate year summer internship in the Business Advisor Program, which is a rotational. I applied under the promise to graduate earlier (I was a sophomore at the time), if I got the FT return offer.

The 1st round was a single 1-on-1 on-campus interview with a manager in the structured finance practice. He had never been through the BAP rotation (either as an intern or full time hire) but managed and worked with BAP members frequently.

The interview was supposed to be non technical (everyone from recruiters to the most recent intern class that they brought back as greeters said so). The interviewer simply asked his "behavioral questions" from the list on his laptop and seemed quite bored, so I decided to try and push to the technical side by mentioning some structured products I had been studying, including bouncing ideas of an alumnus working at a CLO fund.

He suddenly got interested and started pressing me until it was clear we were at the end of my knowledge, so he talked me through a few more principles. He then revealed that he works with the alumnus I mentioned on just this topic. I thought the interview went poorly because we didn't spend much time on fit, but I received a super day offer.

The super day featured three 1-on-1 interviews, one of which was a case interview. In my case, it was behavioral-case-behavioral.

My 1st interview was with a man with really diverse experience. He was a trader and then an internal consultant at a BB before joining E&Y's consulting practice. He had only been with the firm 3 months before I interviewed with him, so we had an interesting dynamic. It went well overall.

The second interview was the case interview, which I felt was extremely thin. The case was about 2 pages long, with little useful information. The meatiest part was the roleplay, where a manager with E&Y played a client that I had to dissuade from a risky venture that was outside her firm's expertise.

The final interview was with another senior manager, who basically tried to measure how well I knew what the E&Y's advisory practice what about, how much I wanted to be a part of it, and how good a fit I would be. Mostly we discussed the difference between a more traditional finance role (Banking and CM) and the consulting oriented role that students take after the BAP. I felt like this was the weakest of my 3 interviews.

The firm then had our hosts (young employees that had been recent hires) take us to a nice lunch, bring us back to the office, where we filled out an feedback form (how well do you feel you did, how much feedback do you feel like you got, are you more or less enthusiastic about E&Y, would you take this job if offered it).

I heard back via e-mail a few weeks later that I had not been offered a position.