First Internship in IB at a Small IB Firm - Advice
Hey all I am a Junior in college, I just started interning during the school year 3x a week. I have no end date either, it's on an "at-will basis" so could I intern for two years and convert to a full-time offer?
The firm is only about 15-20 people including me and has been around for quite some time. They do transactions anywhere from 10m - 1b+. I'd say most are MM deal size. So far they all seem like nice people the office is pretty casual too no suits unless needed obviously. (I wore a suit my first day and still plan to, thoughts on that as well?)
So far my first few days just consist of learning the industry of IB and the sector we specialize in. Like phrases, acronyms, the landscape of the coverage sector, etc.
Just wanted to ask for advice on what I could do as an intern to learn quickly and be helpful as soon as possible to my Analysts and others to give them good impressions. Any advice would be great!
How did you land a sweet internship like that?
Thank you for the compliment. I got it through networking with alumni and a little luck cause the firm was looking for an intern during the school year and the person I was speaking to mentioned it to me so I guess I had a good first impression.
Before someone asks I go to a non-target too, so my alumni connections are also smaller but they do exist!
My (somewhat counterintuitive) advice, as somebody who also started my IB career interning at a boutique: focus on getting really good at PowerPoint. Most people start off thinking that modeling is the vast majority of the analyst job, but especially at most boutiques, that's simply not the case. Unless you're focused on a very niche industry for which modeling is uniquely important, that part of the job will become second nature over time as you get a firmer grasp of advanced financial/Excel concepts and see enough examples at your firm.
On the other hand, a great way to differentiate yourself and show that you can be a strong contributor (especially if you're considering how to leverage the internship to secure a full-time offer) is to show your analysts/associates that you can design and format slides correctly. That means things like font sizes, font colors, and bullet types should always be consistent, all content on a page should be vertically and horizontally aligned properly, color schemes should match throughout a deck, etc.
Most larger firms have dedicated slide design teams (or at least a ton of institutional resources from which to pull PowerPoint templates and design ideas), but boutiques rely more heavily on the skills and creativity of their analysts to make materials look good, and that's an important part of any firm's "brand".
Using analyst manpower to format slides is aids-inducing. Send to India team for dumb shit like that.
He says in his post that this internship (and hopefully full-time analyst role) is for a boutique...most boutiques don't have access to additional resources in India.
I realized that the Analysts were working on PowerPoints a fair amount of the day so that makes sense, so work on PowerPoint skills. Anything else I should do, say, or learn?
Customise your quick access toolbar, as well. I have: align left, align right, align middle, align centre and superscript + others in mine. Superscript in the QAT is great when making footnotes on slides.
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