How to win my Associate's trust back?
After my first couple of days as a soph at a boutique, I've been completely fucking up. Little formatting errors, minor mistakes, etc. Literally every hour yesterday, I'd get a piece of work, be told that it was done soon for x client tonight, complete it, and have my associate shit on me.
Today he apologized and told me he's just been under a lot of stress and he expected me to hit the ground running.
It's not even modelling, it's stupid little excel errors or formatting issues. But I'm worried he won't even let me try the real stuff after fucking up something so basic.
Any ideas how to get around this? I've been told everyone sucks their first week and will have their associates rip them apart, but it feel pretty shit when it actually happens.
double/triple check everything. do good work, and continue to do work. You'll win his trust, and hopefully he'll give you more interesting work to do.
You are a Sophomore, you will be okay. Just keep doing the work.
If you went to a target they would have taught you better...
J/K with practice comes perfection. You will be fine, as long as you don't keep making the same mistake twice.
What type of excel stuff are you doing if it is not modeling?
Echoing the previous helpful remarks.
There was a good post a couple days ago about how to prevent mistakes but I can't seen to find it; perhaps someone else knows which one it is?
Anyway, what kind of errors exactly are you talking about?
Welcome to sell side. Formatting, esp excel sheets is critical in IB. Get over it. You can potentially create checklists for yourself to cover the most important criteria, but at the end of the day it comes down to your ability to stay sharp and learn quickly on your feet how a firm prepares its models. That is why you were hired over the 10,000 other undergraduates vying for your position.
Honestly most post MBA associates don't really give much credibility to analysts. Making a mistake once is fine, you're climbing the learning curve, Continued fumbles just tarnishes your brand, and that is very hard to recovery from at your level. Just don't screw up twice.
I think the main thing to keep in mind right now, is that you shouldn't panic. People screw up - especially just when starting out. Keep doing your best to pay extreme attention to detail, and have confidence that you'll improve.
Print it out. Go through it row-by-row focusing on specific things each time. Instead of going through the doc three times trying to check everything each time you go through it, go through it once just checking the number of digits in each cell, then go through it again focusing on spelling/capitalization, et cetera.
Also, use a ruler as you go through the docs row-by-row so that you can block out all the shit in the next row to help you really focus on the particular row you're looking at.
This.
Being a little bit flippant above (as usual) but it does go to show - bring attention to detail to EVERY aspect of your life - if you are looking to be a banker, that's what will happen anyways.
Give it time and don't underestimate the fact that he was under a lot of stress - it's good he apologized and he should frankly know better than to expect perfection (unless you somehow have IB/excel experience prior to a sophomore year internship???)
Don't stress too much about it, and ABSOLUTELY always print things out - it makes a huge world of difference. Also start getting comfortable on an HP12c and always 'gut check' your numbers to see if they make sense. When I was a first year analyst in my first week, I fucked up a compound interest calc because I got too fancy with the formula, and I showed a 35% yield when something should have clearly been between 8-10% - things like that pop out like crazy when you just take a minute to print and check. Three years later, I was recommended for direct promote to associate and given a 100k bonus (good year for frgna :))
Good luck and do not worry too much, you will be great.
I know I already posted this (more or less), but I want to reiterate the point - don't panic just because things are going a bit rough in the first few days of your internship. Yes it feels awful, but yes it's temporary.
Last year, when I was a summer analyst, I spent the first week thinking that my boss/team saw me as totally incompetent. They had me working on a project that involved a lot of formatting and small details, and they kept being really harsh on me when something wasn't exactly how they wanted it. Nothing seemed to please them. Coming from a good educational background, with good grades and whatnot, I was really choked and didn't know what was wrong with me.
After a little while, when I started getting more comfortable with the team (and the tasks they gave me), things improved dramatically. I had a better understanding of what they expected of me, and my quality of work improved a lot. They were thrilled, and the entire mood of my internship changed. I ended up really bonding with my whole team and having a fantastic experience.
everything above + go out to drink with him and get him a girlfriend.
you're fine. he even apologized..sounds like a grounded reasonable guy. just check more next time and dont get flustered if you make another mistake.
Check your work, just know he's under stress too and you're on the bottom of the hill that shit rolls down.
Haha
Fucking perfect.
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