Absolutely nothing to do as an Intern, anyone else?
I’m a SA at a large international bank doing Credit, and have had legitimately no work 1 month in. All I’ve done so far was finish a large Excel (mostly data entry and basic formulas) and a few quick miscellaneous tasks Analysts have had. 90% of the time I’ve “worked” the past 2 weeks was spent doing literally nothing besides popping my joints, silently sitting through some team meetings where they goof around half the time, and reading the FTimes from 8:30-6.
I’m also the only intern on my team and while FT people can work up to 3x a week from home, I have to be in office 5x a week and often find myself being one of the few (sometimes only) person in from my team. Again, it’s a first world problem as I’m being paid 110k prorata to do Jack shit in an air conditioned office, but the past week of nothingness has started to drive me nuts. You only get emails with requests to your DL so often, and you can only pester Analysts and sometimes Directors so much before crossing the “annoying” line. It’s always “I’ll let you know”, which is basically a polite please leave me alone. Or at best a 30 minute assignment.
Sometimes the main Director will give me a task, but it’s always some data entry or tedious search which teaches me nothing. The guy himself isn’t too socially aware and will be like “oh this is super low priority so I’ll send the data tomorrow” or “no one reads that anyways” when an analyst gave me a report. There is a good MD who saw my peril and took me for a few lessons about the business, but he’s on vacation till EOM now and will only be back on my final week.
No client meets which they promised, no structured training with rotations between teams, literally nothing from the job description is taking form. How the hell am I gonna explain my wasted summer when i hopefully get interviews from anywhere else?
Basically wanted to know how normal this is and if my concerns are justified, as I am dead set on re-recruiting for hopefully S&T or ER and cannot imagine joining this nothing burger for Full Time. Even the analyst work looks mostly managerial and insanely boring.
YMMV from bank-to-bank, but I can see this as being accurate. If the bank doesn't have a formal credit training type of program; then nobody knows what to do with you and you are/would be in their way and there's no potentially no incentive for them to take time out of their day to teach you things. Which sucks bro, so I feel for you.
If you are interested in the business and want to potentially do this work FT... make hay while the sun is shining. Presumably you have access to systems and reports on the intranet site. Forget the Financial Times - pore through every single section of the intranet site you can. Find reports that list out new transactions recently approved and go into the origination system to find the packages. Pull the source financials and compare the source financials to the analysis completed and make sure you see how they did what they did. Read the credit memos to see if they explain anything weird. The more recent transactions the better as you can potentially take a list of questions to the analyst or director that did it and ask the questions. There is so much you can learn from completed transactions if you have the mindset to work backwards. Or if you are truly that bored... find a recent deal and pull the source financials and write your own analysis blind. Then compare your notes and findings with what actually got approved. Self-guided case studies are better than nothing.
If there is actually an old paper credit file room... see if you can get in there and just start looking at stuff. Never know what you'll find.
If you want some real fun, find a report that lists out the problem loans for the quarter and pull those files. There are likely quarterly update memos in the file. Go look at the financials at origination, financials at time of downgrade to problem status, and financials in the quarters/years since it was downgraded. See what kinds of observations you can make. If you're that bored, call up the special assets officer working on a deal that is interesting and ask if there's anything you can do to help them out.
Aside from that, see if whoever is in the office wants to go to lunch with you. Or for beers after work. Or take your own long lunches and hit the gym or something to better yourself besides just sitting in a cubicle reading the news.
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