I am deciding between two internship offers with upcoming expirations.
My career goal is to eventually move into Buy-Side Asset Management.
1st Offer: Investment Research Intern for Wealth Management
The company outsources most of its investment research and investment decisions to Investment Managers. Therefore, my main role their would be to research investment managers and decide which funds would be best suited for the clients.
2nd Offer: Corporate Development Intern for TMT Company
My main role would be to find target companies for potential acquisition and create financial models for these companies.
I understand they are very different career paths. Here is my thinking:
For the 1st offer, I would be getting great experience in a setting/industry close to my end-goal. However, I question the lack of relevant experience in terms of day-to-day assignments given that I won't be researching any specific securities.
For the 2nd offer, I understand the industry and the role itself may not give me the best odds to reach my end goal. With that said, I think the financial modeling experience and skill development can be very useful and transferrable to a future investing role. I think I would be able to twist that internship experience in future interviews.
What do you guys think? I know there are so many other factors to consider, so I understand that you may not be able to come to a decision. Any kind of thought will help.
Bump. If anyone could provide some insight, that would be great. This is fairly time sensitive.
Is this for sophomore or junior summer?
Either way I'm leaning towards the corporate development role. Outside of the large WM analyst training programs, WM internships aren't the most impressive thing, and you would be in a fund-of-funds analyst role essentially evaluating managers. If it's for sophomore summer I could somewhat see it because it would give you exposure to investment philosophies and the lingo, but the direct relevance of the corporate development role seems more important.
You're going to have to network for FT roles either way. Think about what you want to do out of undergrad and whether AM is what you will be pursuing immediately or as a step two. In those interviews and in networking emails, I think the CD role will be easier to explain as a beneficial experience that fits your desire to move into an investing role. Doing due diligence on a company, making financial models and contributing to the thought process of whether that business is a good investment for the company is all more valuable than learning how wealth management works, the statistics used to evaluate manager performance, allocation reasoning across strategies etc.
Thank you for that explanation. I had a similar line of thinking.
How would the Corporate Development role compare to a WM Investment Research internship where I would be performing real investment research on various securities for clients to purchase?
I would imagine this would be more relevant experience. Is this a correct assumption?
It depends on the roles. Is this CD role for a small company trying to grow geographically through hub-and-spoke type acquisitions that are less about strategic evaluations of the businesses than just expanding your territory? I've seen roles like that for insurance-type businesses that don't seem all that exciting as they just buy up regional brokers. Alternatively what would the WM role be like? Plenty of WM roles manifest through parents calling their buddies who let their kids come shadow them for a summer without real responsibilities and no structured training. This causes some negative bias towards WM internships. If the role is at an FA that has in-house investment research and actively manages their client's money, then it could be a great experience if they teach you the basics of fundamental analysis.
There's no perfect answer, and without knowing the specifics its hard to say. You'll be going a non-traditional route into what you want to do so its important to build experience that builds towards what you want. Think about what you want to be able to say in cold-emails and at networking events to the people you would like to recruit with full time and how these roles will add to that narrative. Just bullshitting here but both roles can be spun easily.
"I've always been interested in valuing companies and was excited by the opportunity to do up close due diligence and create detailed financial models in CD. I am however more interested in the public markets and would like to move into a role that evaluates investment opportunities beyond the confines of what value it adds to Company X through an acquisition."
"I have always been interested in the public markets and sought out this role to gain experience performing fundamental analysis and making investment recommendations. I would like to shift to a role in AM as I would like to exclusively work on investment research rather than split time with client services in WM."
I agree the corporate dev role is better. While it's not public equity securities, developing an investment thesis for an acquisition/etc and building a model, sensitizing it, and analyzing the risks are basically the same thing as public investing. The experience could be spun much better, in my mind. The issue is, you need to get the chance to explain how relevant it is (ie through good networking).
To answer your other question, yes, if you were doing actual stock analysis for the wealth management, that would probably be better. To be fair though, When I was in a front office asset management role, I couldn't help but see wealth management on a lower tier. Probably not bad enough that you'd get labeled middle office, but lower nonetheless.
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