With so many college students working at a search fund, but calling themselves a “Private Equity” analyst/intern for IB recruiting, do recruiters check if it’s a prestigious PE internship or a shitty search fund?
| +439 | Female bankers doing brand deals on TikTok | 120 | 8h |
| +142 | UBS rolling out Enhanced Clean Desk Policy, bans deal toys | 16 | 3d |
| +100 | Starting FT in a city 3 hours away, dad has progressing Parkinson's. Looking for advice. | 8 | 1d |
| +73 | JULY 2026 CHICAGO BANK RANKINGS | 29 | 7h |
| +64 | Restructuring is paradise (a completely unbiased account) | 6 | 4d |
| +37 | Not Treated Well by Other Interns | 20 | 2d |
| +36 | Handling frustration | 5 | 4d |
| +35 | Taking days off as an intern | 17 | 9h |
| +28 | Thoughts on Intrepid - Houlihan Merger | 10 | 3d |
| +27 | IB TikTok Influencers (wehave2wizards) | 9 | 3d |
Career Resources
Get instant access to lessons taught by experienced private equity pros and bulge bracket investment bankers including financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel Modeling.
google
Del.
I have had dozens of first round screener calls with kids with PE roles listed on their resume only for it to be a cold calling role for a searcher. Those people get through the resume stage, but it becomes clear within 30 seconds of the first question on the topic that they have no real experience in the space. Nearly all of the people I've interviewed with that background I found to be very disappointing as we will ask applicants about it and expect them to have a better understanding of PE than someone that just did PWM or IB for the summer.
- a jaded PE guy that does too recruiting work.
What if I’m not cold calling but doing interesting work like a case study or due diligence? I might obv not get staffed on deals, but it’s more than cold calling.
You will be fine as long as you are honest and do not exaggerate on your resume. Have a tight narrative on what you worked on (case study), contributions to the team / workflows you were in, understand the overarching purpose of the searcher, why people invest in search, and be able to compare it with traditional control private equity / buyout.
No one cares. These internships are just a check in the box. I did "investment banking" internship at a business brokerage firm that does $5M deal annually and was still able to get interview at most BBs and EBs. I did go to a target but highly unlikely the case would have been different if I went to a non-target. The vast majority of the people who give shit about Fresh/Soph internships are either nepo kids or some how landed a role at a big company via resume drop via Handshake from a target.
It depends on where you are in your college years I think. I did a search fund my sophomore year, so no one really questioned it that much. I also got lucky with a good managing principal that appreciated my approach to sourcing and also allowed me to build a LBO model for a real deal, so I had a good amount to talk about.
I think it would have been scrutinized far more heavily if this was my junior year internship. Some firms definitely still shit on me (Moelis lol), but generally people were receptive once I actually got a chance to talk about what I did. Also helps that I went to a target school of course.
Luckily was able to pivot that to a real summer analyst role in IB.
Frankly it doesn't matter too much whether it's a prestigious PE internship or a terrible search fund. The resume will get through since it's finance experience. As long as you aren't over exaggerating the experience during the interview then it's fine. It's more important to just show you have some interest in finance by having these internships on your resume.
The actual work you do on the internship will vary widely since it's up to the firm on whether you do legit work or if it's more of a free side project for them. It's impossible to really standardize or correlate the quality of experience against the prestige of the fund since it is really up to the fund on what they want to staff you on. Some search funds will have their interns do crazy amounts of work that may end up being more eventful than going to a prestigious PE firm who just has an intern program to just give back and won't trust you on any real live deal.
If you have a prestigious PE firm as your internship and it's not your junior summer, which it can't be if you are recruiting for junior SA, then I assume you got it through family connections so it's not extremely impressive in the grand scheme of things. That's not to say you shouldn't go to a prestigious PE firm if you have the chance, but just saying that the perceived disparity of how we assess your prior experience isn't that much of a difference since after all you are just a college summer intern.
Del.
Yes, but would say there is a slight correlation of work quality and name value or AUM. To play some extremes, if you are joining a one-man shop the experience there is probably not that great instead of a more established small shop that has some sort of dealflow. But once you get to a certain bar in terms of quality of shop, which is not a high bar by any means, then the work experience is more important than the incremental prestige of the fund.
For the firms that do have a huge emphasis on evaluating your prior work experience, it will be a lot easier to adequately discuss what exactly you did day-to-day on the internship and how those skills are transferrable to the next role. To take the other extreme spectrum, let's say you are a freshman intern at Apollo. There is really no shot you are getting very quality reps during this internship since there is no way Apollo is going to trust an freshman intern to do any sort of work on a potential transaction. This candidate would end up just saying they shadowed or took notes on calls. I would rather take the other one who worked at a small search fund but was able to spend time researching a specific industry vertical, conduct initial screening calls with potential leads, and analyze high-level financials provided by a management team.
Taking a step back, with how accelerated recruiting timelines are, it's not too common for interviews and processes to hone in too much on your prior internship experience. Recruiting has been so accelerated to the point where some candidates haven't even taken a finance course. I'm not saying no firm will diligence your internships since some interviewers are very tough but from my standpoint as a person who will conduct interviews for recruiting, I do not care too much about what exactly you did at an internship. If you had a finance internship then that's a positive and shows your interest in the industry but I am not going to ding you because you picked the "wrong" finance internship that didn't give you real work to do. Having quality internship reps can certainly help on the other questions I ask during an interview since you can potentially draw from your internship experience to answer my interview questions so that's the real benefit.
Voluptas voluptatem aut nobis non voluptatum quos nostrum. Et omnis animi non ab magnam similique qui rerum. Cumque fugiat rerum ex laborum voluptatem nostrum ab rem.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...