How to Prepare for IB Summer Internship

After months of recruiting, I finally have an IB internship lined up at a BB in New York next summer. While I have a good conceptual understanding of the technical IB concepts, I have no prior experience in IB and have limited experience using excel/powerpoint. What are some excel/powerpoint/bloomberg/modeling courses you guys used to prepare for your investment banking internships and would recommend that I use given I have no prior experience?

Would also be great to hear about some books you guys read to get more familiar with the industry. Could be serious (like Barbarians at the Gate) or more fun (like Liars Poker, The Buy Side, Young Money). 

Thanks!

14 Comments
 

As someone who did a sophomore internship at MS and has a BB internship lined up for 2021 (declined return offer), you really don’t need to prepare at all. 90% of the tasks you receive are administrative like: Industry research, Note Taking, Moving data between excel sheets (I never used excel before my internship and am a lib arts major). Even if you are given a bigger tasks like spreading comps or doing a a couple pages of a CIM, there’s ALWAYS a template for you to basically plug and chug into.

I think it’s be a waste to spend too much time focusing on complex excel modeling considering no analyst is going to let you run a DCF or pro-forma merger analysis alone - at best you could shadow them why they work on it and ask questions. I’d spend the time now learning about your industry, like the most recent mega deals and the rationale behind them or the average multiple ranges for deals in your industry and why, so you can get a sense of the big picture of what you’re working on. People are very busy and won’t have time to explain everything to you, and your turnaround times are far too quick for a thousand questions. Just get smarter about current financial news in general, but that’s my two cents

 

You’ll be totally useless for the first month anyway and people don’t expect you to know how to use PPT/XLS. On your first day, print out a list of PPT/XLS shortcuts and ping it next to your screen. In the meantime, party HARD if you can. 

 

Also please do not read any finance book prior to starting, you’ll spend enough all nighters on the job to see what it’s like that you don’t have to read about it in a book as well. 
 

only useful thing to do would be to read the FT so that you don’t sound stupid when someone say we’ll pitch for Bayer / P&G / GE and you don’t know who they are

 

If you want to learn something. Learn to use ppt. Learn how to be fluent with ppt. It will help you a lot for your final project. Excel too, but I personally didn’t really use excel that much.

Also read books on how people work and think. This will be advantageous not just in your internship but for every interaction you have with people.

Two recommendations:

Never split the difference and How to win friends and influence people

 

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