Bankers get annoyed with interns that waste their time, take forever to get tasks done & still get them wrong.
I interned at an elite boutique in NY and was lucky enough to have an analyst mentor who shared three techniques he used to not piss off the older bankers.
I didn’t learn these things until halfway through the summer.
Learn them now & you’ll be every associate’s favorite intern & undoubtedly secure the return.
1 ) Collect Questions like Pokémon Cards
Ever work on HW in high school and your mom would barge into your room every 5min to ask you a question?
That’s how bankers feel about interns wasting their time. Don’t be that guy. Some tips:
- Let ?’s pile up before asking (unless 100% urgent)
- Have a notebook sole purpose running list of ?’s
- Ask teammates when a good time would be to run through them
- Swing by and rapid fire. Take notes
2 ) Repeat Understanding + Your Plan Using Own Words
When given something to do - be a parrot and repeat EXACTLY what your understanding of the task at hand is in your own words. Do this face-to-face (phone if need-be).
How to do this:
- Repeat your interpretation of why you’re making the PPT slide, etc.
- Explain what your plan is to tackle (they’ll chime in if they’d approach more efficiently…)
- Tell them when you plan on starting (if need to push because other more urgent tasks)
- Mention you’ll send over progress in an hour to confirm on right track
- Clarify deadline and urgency
This makes expectations crystal clear.
Important because they’re usually vague when giving initial task, forgetting you know nothing.
3 ) Ask for Examples
The amount of time I WASTED trying to make PPT slides & models from scratch is embarrassing.
Don’t waste precious time trying to re-invent the wheel.
You will learn 10x faster by leveraging examples. Banking = apprenticeship after all.
When assigned task…
- Ask if they can send you example to model your deliverable off of
- OR if they know where any would be located in the drive
Point Is - Bankers will love you for not wasting their time and producing higher quality work more efficiently if you incorporate these three tactics from week one.
this is great- thanks. Do interns mostly work on PPT, or is there excel modeling like DCFs as well?
All depends on bank and experiences vary from person to person but -
From my experience it’s mostly working in PPTs that are tied to excel backups. Lots of making charts and visuals in excel based on new data
Are there any resources available online to hone on PPT skills before the internship starts?
What interns don’t get is that an M&A deal done as fast as possible takes ~10 weeks. Most are way longer with many taking even longer than a year.
As a result, no intern can really be client facing even if they think they are. It looks bad to a client if someone is on a task as an intern and then leaves.
The result is it’s pretty impossible for an intern to be given control of a model or any major deliverable.
The internship is best thought of as little tests of tastes of the job people are giving you to see if you are ready for the real thing. A great intern will usually be given some ppt work, some tracking assignment, and maybe some data cutting exercise or a portion of the model that a senior analyst will then check.
Thanks for this
had a question regarding sending progress to associate. Can this not come across as annoying especially if you have clarified with them on what needs to be done?
when you say send an update do you mean send over the work product ? Or update regarding the progress of a task?
They won’t be annoyed if you do it right because usually it is to meet an urgent deadline and they want to be in the loop to know how far various work streams are.
I’d always attach what I had on the email and just say I’ve gotten ____ part done of it and think I should be on pace to have it done by ____.
All depends on the task - for super brief tasks you prob don’t need to but for ones that are expected to take longer they’d rather not have you spin your wheels for 3hr going in wrong direction that they’re going to have to fully re-do anyways. Wastes your time and their time
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