Able to intern for front office of NBA team ( pay is good hours are good and the work benefits are insane) but not sure the work I would be doing would be applicable for IB recruiting. Was wondering if pay is same, should I take boutique?Want to use this summer experience to pivot for soph SA/ junior SA
Additional context: working at search fund since January. Attend a Semi-target/target school.
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Would go for the NBA in a heartbeat. Those types of roles can be hard to come across. You might end up liking enough to build a career outside of IBD. It's your freshman summer and you have so much time to gain finance experience - plus you get a cool line on your resume to talk about.
What type of school do you go to? If a non-target, then I'd take the boutique.
Semi target
Delete this shit. You are kinda doxxing yourself. There are ways for people to see your username (WSO is a glitchy site), so you don't know what might be connected to this.
100% intern for the NBA team. Personally, I think it will give you WAY more interesting things to talk about when you interview for a real SA role as a junior. I'd way rather hear a dude tell me some stories from his time as an intern for the Celts than try to convince me he actually learned anything about corporate finance / M&A as a 19 year old intern for a Merrill Lynch PWM branch.
NBA for sure. Especially with some finance on your resume, that's a really unique "hook" that will make both IB and PE later on want to talk to you just to hear about it
NBA for sure. Way cooler story + you have the rest of your life to push logos around at a no-name boutique.
NBA sounds dope
Go for NBA
Okay. Now that youre on the other side of the recruiting scene, does relevant finance internships matter more? Or type of internship you did?
Yes I want to do the NBA Summer gig but I don't want to miss out on having very little finance internship experience( have a search fund internship right now).
Yes finance internships matter but you will regret passing up a unique opportunity particularly if it’s front office analytics related. It’s still a fairly prestigious internship in an NBA FO
NBA
It is a fair point that having the IBD internship will allow you to land a sophomore SA gig wayyy easier (reason why most banks don’t take sophomores is because they have no experience/haven’t taken finance classes yet). But also a lot of people don’t even do sophomore SA, so you could just do a random finance internship and then hope you can land a junior SA.
But the NBA stuff sounds more interesting and will probably be 5x as fun as a banking internship as a freshman (which you probably won’t be doing very important shit anyway).
I think the real question is how good is your school (you said semi-target) and honestly how good of a candidate are you? Will you be able to land a junior SA gig because you have good grades/are personable/networked/etc? If yes, then I would do NBA. If your grades are shitty and for some reason you think you will struggle with junior SA recruiting, than having early IBD experience might be more beneficial.
I did 2 early IBD internships in college which helped me land my junior SA internship (spoke extensively about the live deal experience I had in my junior SA interviews) and then I landed a top BB role for FT. I went to a non-target and am non-diversity, so I found it very helpful that I had that prior experience for when interviewing for my junior SA internship.
Daoge
I would take the NBA role. Sounds way more fun and I’d much rather talk about basketball than your freshman IB internship during a coffee chat. Besides, you still have your sophomore summer. Only caveats would be 1. you hate basketball (or professional sports in general) 2. You have a terrible resume and got this gig through nepotism.
Fwiw I’m hoping to exit to a front office role at the NBA (or other major league sports team) after my banking stint. Huge pay it but sounds way more interesting. Actually spent my freshman and sophomore summers working retail. At GS/MS/JPM now from a non-target.
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NBA for sure. Like others said, it will give you more to talk about in future interviews. Only thing I'd add is that most firms won't look that favorably on freshman year IBD internships. They read that on a resume as "I sat in a storage closet at my dad's friend's office for the summer." Most freshman yr internships are expected to have very little value add in the eyes of hiring managers.
As others have said, NBA and it is not even close. I wish I did something this fun as an internship in my career.
Trust me when I say this: This will be the kind of experience that will help you stand out in recruiting. As someone who has scanned plenty of resumes, seeing this experience would pique my interest enough to consider you for an interview.
Bro NBA lol. It is very typical for kids to do Boutique IB internships during he school year. Ive done one every semester and landed it with ease. You should just recruit for a boutique ib internship for this fall. Boutique IB, NBA FO, Searchfund combo is a strong resume for sure.
Frankly I’m asking why you want to go into banking if you can do NBA front office. I would totally do that as a career, it’s many people’s dream. Wonder if you don’t like basketball.
they arent extending return offers. They made it pretty clear you need IB/PE/Consulting/Law school on resumes. It is my dream career but I want to position myself where when I reapply down the line, I want to be a strong candidate.
You should still do the internship. Especially if it’s a well respected org like Warriors, Spurs, 76ers.
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