how to quit an internship

Hi all,

I am currently doing an internship at a decent PE fund. Overall, it’s been a pretty shit experience. After 3 months, I have not been staffed on any live deals (i’ve asked, but they told me that there aren’t any new ones and all the old ones are too far along in the process for me to join).

90% of the work I do is for their portfolio company (making slides with animations and graphics, lol). The remaining 10% is adhoc work and I am not kept in the loop on the outcome of the project. I pretty much do my own thing.

Apart from the lack of mentorship/projects, there is one person I’ve had a bad experience working with:

1) constantly passes off portfolio work to me so that he can work on actual deals. This has already deprived me of the chance to work on other projects which I can learn more from. His bad time management has also resulted in me staying OT/weekends to do this work (office manager has already told me the company doesn’t want interns staying late/weekends) 2) doesn’t give clear instructions. Will not clarify what is needed, make me do a draft, have it rejected, and then I need to redo which wastes a lot of my time — leading to working OT/weekends. Will also call me over to his desk to give instructions, but then will spend a long time “thinking” about what to do while I just stand there.

There are other things that speak towards his work ethic and personal capability, which I can’t say.

I would tough it out if I was actually learning anything, but it’s been 3 months. I still have one month to go and I really don’t want to waste any more of my time here. I don’t intend to work FT at this place or in PE in the near future (I have interned in IBD and will be going back).

Would be grateful for advice on how to deal with this (should I/how to quit, if I should speak with the person or office manager instead). I am really scared of repercussions because the industry is so small, and many of the people at my company have worked in IBD before.