BAML / Bank of America is going virtual this summer

Hey guys, was a virtual intern for BofA last year in an IB coverage group. Couple of things I thought I’d share to be helpful. We did still receive a housing stipend of $2,500 (if I remember correctly) that they encouraged use to use to purchase a WFH setup. For IB at least, we all received the original pay of the city we would’ve been working in despite not living in those cities for the summer. I received and accepted a full-time offer at the end of the summer. Return offer rates were quite high across all of IB (only one person I’m my group did not receive an offer and it was due to behavior reasons). They cut it from 10 to 8 weeks, but still paid us for the other 2 weeks. So in terms of all of that, BofA did a great job and I walked away with a lot more money than all of my others friends who had their salaries cut down. In terms of the actual work, however, we were unfortunately not able to work on live deals (this was true of all product and coverage groups from what I’m aware of). Instead, we spent the first week doing generalized training with the entire intern class across all divisions. This was mostly just like BofA history stuff, compliance, etc. The next next 3 weeks you did division-specific training with Financial Edge, which is a 3rd party vendor that used live instructors and covered almost all topics (accounting, modeling, valuation). Intertwined with this, we had to do an HR-driven project about portfolio allocation in a group of 8 people, with group members coming from almost every division. Starting week 4, we “hit the desk” with our actual groups where we were introduced to our summer project. The summer project consisted of a fake M&A deal with one company in our relevant industry buying another company (for my friends in product groups, their work was similar but just a little more focused on their product). In association with this deal, we had to value the target company using all methods and also had to build a slide deck to analyze the deal. We submitted this to our staffer at the end of the summer but did not have to present on it. In addition to this, we would have Zoom calls 4-5 times a week with different MDs in our group who would talk about what they do, what they’re seeing within their verticals, and finally finish with some Q&A. During the second half of the summer, we also had another HR project where we had to build a deck about how banks could help save the struggling art industry (don’t ask me why, this was a distraction tbh). Also, intertwined with all of this, we did a virtual service project for the Smithsonian Institute that consisted of transcribing images of old written pages (again, idk). My hours during the first 4 weeks averaged probably 50. My hours from weeks 5-6 averaged 60ish. During the last two weeks, i worked about 90 each week, but this was by my own design because I was worried about getting a return offer and wanted my summer project to be really good. I probably could’ve gotten away with 60 hours per week like most of the other interns in my group. All in all, was very happy with my summer, especially in comparison to my friends at other banks who also didn’t do actual deals/pitches but got paid significantly less.