Can an Internship in operations benefit IBD

I am in my first year of a four year finance and economics course, I have applied for an Internship in the Operations department at Morgan Stanley. I am unsure if this will be any benefit to me as I want to become an Investment Banker, hopefully in M&A, So I am just curious to find out if this internship can help me in any way?

11 Comments
 

What it will help you do is gain experience, network, and leverage. It will not give you the experience where someone from IBD will see this as a direct line into IBD. If this is your first internship, take it. When I was in your position, I had 5 internships. The reason I got them was because I used each one as leverage into the next. If you have nothing else, take it and network your ass off.

 

I did an Ops Internship in the fall, as mentioned above, network everyday. If the program is at the same BB I was in you should not have any issues networking internally especially since you already have IB internship experience. Also, make sure you don't discuss you're goals of getting in IBD with your Ops team.

And yes, towards the end of the program you can speak to HR about what your true interests are, in terms of when I told them around a month (estimate) before the end of the internship. I set up a 1 on 1 with the HR manager who was in charge of the group. During the conversation, I was just honest and said I enjoyed the experience, really wanted to be a part of the firm, but Operations was not the best fit and said if it would be possible to be considered for IB etc.

Best of luck, pm if you have other questions.

 

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