Director wants to “chat” about my model as an intern. Wtf?
I am writing this as I currently cannot sleep and probably over caffeinated. Sorry if I sound like a spaz.
I am doing an internship at an MMBB and I was tasked with looking at a potential target for a client and my job was simply running a DCF. Long story short I do the DCF the way I learned in school + the million courses I took and give it to my supervising analyst. He says “cool”, gives some advice and then I don’t really hear back for around two days. Then I get an email saying that tomorrow the Director wants to have chat with me about it. Why the fuck, would he want to have a chat with me about that? And why me? I’m the bottom of the food-chain. I also have the feeling that it can’t be good, as if it were, surely one of the people above, the Analyst, Associate, VP, would take credit. But then also, if it were crap, why waste his time? Just cut some heads off.
Long story short I really don’t know how to approach this and I’ve never really heard of this being a thing. I have no clue what questions to expect or what this chat is meant to be about. If anyone has some clue, guess or had a similar experience please let me know.
ALSO, I did my research on the guy and he rly doesn’t seem that fun tbh. I kinda take him to be the “old guard” of the bank type of guy if you know what I’m saying.
Relax dude. It’s all part of the drill. Lots of still in banking has no meaning, least of all it seems the behavior of more senior folks. He knows he can do whatever he wants with an intern. Just carry on
Relax, if anything was messed up in the model you would never be blamed for it as an intern. It is the job of your analyst / associate to double-check all your work as an intern, especially when it comes to more complex tasks such as a model. If you messed up, the assoc / analyst would get shit on and then they would tell you.
In my experience when more senior people take the time to spend time with interns, it is a good sign. When I was an intern, I worked directly a lot with a senior associate and he spent a lot of time with me because he saw potential in me. He refused to work with certain junior analysts and had everything they did go through a senior analyst first but worked directly with me. When it came to MDs, I heard nothing from them at all during the majority of my internship. During my last 2 weeks before getting the FT offer, all the MDs in the group wanted to catch up and discuss projects I was on etc.
With that said, most likely it is a good sign but you can still get your ass whipped if you fucked up badly and the MD is old school.
Prepare for a negative conversation but you could be pleasantly surprised. If he is an asshole he will disregard the fact that he should be chewing out his VP/AS/AN for not checking shit and just blame it on you. Unlikely. More likely he is just going to use the time to get to know you better and give you tips to improve.
Scapegoating an intern is a bush league as it gets.
Like others have said, it’s likely a nothing burger. It might even be a good thing (facetime). But if you’re getting ripped for your model as an intern, that’s toxic. You’d be dodging a bullet by not working there.
The model is probably a low priority item in the first place (otherwise wouldn’t have given that to you) and director probably has a bit of time yo review.
It’s possible that he chased the analyst and analyst replied « i’m under water on priorities 1-10 but the intern had a crack at it if you want to review before I have time to do so »
Chill, have another go through your model to see if you haven’t done something that you can spot (formulas that don’t carry across) and be ready to sit down for a couple of hours. As a VP i used to do that with first year analysts regularly - gave me certainty that they heard my direct guidance and that helped me enforce good habits (in particular if I knew a certain associate wasn’t thorough himself).
This post is why we occasionally human sacrifice an intern to please the gods
He's probably going to give some generic, positive affirmation, some constructive criticism, then talk to you generally about how you liked the internship, how you thought you fit in with the team, if you had any questions for him etc.
It's the time of the summer when those conversations start to happen with seniors.
What courses have you done that are free, out of interest. Thx
Bump
I actually did the WSO and some WSP ones, they’re both really good and then I combined that with the classic “Investment banking” book by Rosenbaum (I think that’s the name). I found most courses that are free to not be great ngl. If there is one piece of advice I could give is if you don’t really want to pay for courses that is fine, but for your own sake, get one for excel mastery. It’s actually sacrosanct to be fluent in excel without touching the mouse and it will save you a lot of time.
Dude relax he's just trying to give you some face time near the end of your internship hahah. He's prob just gonna give you some vague/general pointers and talk through things with you, see how you like the work, see how your attitude is, see how you communicate, etc. I would show up really prepped though and take it as a tryout for FT, maybe people have recommended you for FT and he just wants to speak with you a bit first.
If this guy / your group / your bank isn't a total clown, it's just to give you some coaching and guidance. Interns are never given anything that matters.
That said - each group usually has their own nuanced way of doing things like DCFs and WACCs, so you probably just didn't adhere to the group standards. If this guy doesn't want to talk to you about anything other than telling helping you adhere to how the group does it, that would be ridiculous.
What was it about?
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