Are Fall Internships Worth the Time?

Hi Guys,

I'm a rising junior at a target and am facing a bit of a dilemma as school's about to start. For the last week I've been somewhat aggressively cold calling boutiques around my school and, while nothing is official yet, it looks as though I might get an offer or two. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if the experience would be worth the time and effort.

My GPA as of right now is a horrible 3.2 (senioritis dipped into freshman year) but with a 4.0 or high 3's this semester I could raise my overall to 3.3-3.4. I'm wondering if my time would be better served focusing on grades, networking and ec's (which I am also somewhat lacking in).

Thanks!

 
Best Response
  1. 3.2 is not a horrible GPA. Seriously.

  2. You haven't been very specific, but if you get an offer and its in the field that you want to do, take it. Fall internship will be like any other (maybe less structured but that can be better) You'll be getting experience. This is more valuable than grades - people want to know that you can do the job rather than take a cold punt on someone good grades or not.

In the fall internship you'll learn a lot, get experience, meet people at the company (networking), hopefully meet people they know (clients, competitors, friends etc - be sure to be nice and open to learning to all of them), maybe get a better idea about what you want to do in your career, etc etc etc. Maybe you'll get an offer. Maybe you won't but if the people like you, they will introduce you around. This is much much more powerful than going back to school, grinding out a few GPA points and some fake ECs and putting your name in a resume drop.

Good Luck

I used to do Asia-Pacific PE (kind of like FoF). Now I do something else but happy to try and answer questions on that stuff.
 

Thanks so much for your input. I haven't gotten the offers explicitly yet but the I spoke to a couple of MD's and they heavily hinted (yes, I know not guaranteed) that I could join on for the semester. One is a small M&A IBD boutique and the other is a very small PE firm.

I guess I'm really worried because it seems everyone on WSO agrees that anything sub-3.5 would make getting a BB sa stint really damn hard without extensive networking.

 

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I used to do Asia-Pacific PE (kind of like FoF). Now I do something else but happy to try and answer questions on that stuff.

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