Being stuck

I have met people for informational interviews and they said it is important to not take other roles in the hope of levering that experience to investment banking or sales and trading and you can get stuck.
Were they just talking about back office roles or is it possible to move freely between Asset Management, Investment banking and sales and trading?
E.g if I take an asset management role, could I leverage that to an investment banking internship?

7 Comments
 

Part of the purpose of internships is to figure out whether or not it's something you want to do with your life. You can "spin" just about any of those experiences to your favor, the more related the better but I wouldn't pass up on an internship out of fear of getting stuck.

 
Best Response

Agreeing with the comments already made, but to try adding some value to the discussion (and stealing a bit from M&I), you need something at least related to IBD or s&t.

In the case of IBD, if your job involves modeling, lotsa PowerPoint, etc, you can spin it in a way that you have the skillset, but for interest reasons want to go to IBD. Likewise for S&T, if your other exp involves following the markets and making calculated bets, then you can spin it in the proper way. In either case, a back office risk/audit/tax job will get you none of those. This is a driving factor why back office has more trouble - their skillset just isn't what IBD generally requires.

To answer your example, an AM gig MAY be transferable to IBD if you can align skills developed at the internship to IBD along with a believable story as to why IBD instead of AM.

Lemme know if you have any other questions.

 

So if I want to become a trader, doing an internship in operations could be suitable which I could leverage to trading the following summer or to a full time position?

 

In my experience: If the internship is within finance, even if it has no tranferable skills, you are fine. If the internship is not in finance, but has transferable skills, you are not fine. Aim to 'stick to an area', explore within that area and make sure your internships make logical sense.

 

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