I am intimidated by my intern class
I just recieved my group placement for my summer analyst class for my internship at a top BB in London last week and I am super intimidated by them. First off there is so many interns on assigned to my team. I was not expecting so many interns that I have to compete with on this team. I am not super competent at technicals or modelling, and everyone else that is an intern mogs me completely - they are all Europeans with previous internships, crazy extracurriculars and absolute chads.
How do I cope with this. Its going to be a bad year for return offers and now I have to deal with this...
Plenty of time between now and the summer. More than enough time to crank up your technical ability a few notches. Not to mention countless other ways to prep ahead of time to maximize your impact.
You either want it or you don't...
Hey thanks for the advice - maybe it came across wrong in the post, but I know I can grind the technicals that is the one thing in my control.
You're there for a reason. Someone important enough thought you belonged in the room, so take that for what it's worth. All those guys are insecure af, too, no matter how much they're sticking their chest out so don't worry about it. Focus on yourself and be better than yesterday. It sounds cliche, but you're your competition. Teach yourself what you need to know to start feeling confident about your abilities during your free time.
How you made it with weak technicals and modeling? Are you a nepo/DEI?
Its relative weakness. I done well enough in my interviews to get the offer, but I am a UK student, so being the best at technicals then is very different from competing against guys 3-4 years older than me with 2 or more off cycles
Learning what a DCF and LBO are for interview technicals is very different from doing them in practice
Don’t sweat. Some of these kids are pretty dumb. Grind technicals and practice modeling if you feel so inclined.
I agree with this + the most underrated skill, especially at a junior level, is being easy to work with. That’s entirely within your control.
+1.
I always get very good - great reviews, but I am not oustanding or anything. I just sit there, do the work assigned to me in the right quality and right speed. Especially as an intern and Analyst, you often wont touch the actually technical topics in the models.
need to change the mindset here; you're not competing against other interns because it's your offer to lose. volatile market conditions or not, you need to think of it as it's your offer to lose.
Is this BofA?
no bofa IB summer is a generalist programme
I'm pretty sure this could be JPM HC. Last year they took 9 interns. I'm curious to know who the hell takes that many,
Right? And who has the time to train and manage these kids
No one lol. You're just a personal assistant to the team. Hence why the BB interns tend to do nothing as you're not trusted when you start. Some get lucky to work on some bits - mainly admin work is what is expected.
I felt the same way when I did my SA stint back in the day. I was only 19 years old (turned 20 at the back end of the internship), UK student, not studying finance and only speaking English. And I was competing against European business school students in their mid 20s who mostly had a masters in finance, spoke 3-4 languages and had 2-3 internships already under their belt. I was incredibly intimidated and felt like I would never be able to compete.
However I ended up working incredibly hard to get up the steep learning curve and ended up getting the return offer and many of the guys I was intimidated by did not (low return offer rates that year due to brexit vote). I started that internship knowing absolutely nothing in comparison to those guys but my progression throughout the 10 weeks coupled with the fact I was well-liked was enough to convince the team to extend an offer.
My advice is to focus less on the other guys and just do absolutely everything within your control to demonstrate you are capable of doing the job.
One thing I've learned through interning is someone can look really good on paper but actually have no clue what they're doing. Just keep that in mind before sounding off the alarms
I interview a lot of the people who received return offers from these places for our internship program. I can assure you that the vast majority aren’t a fraction as good as they seem on paper. A lot of it is smoke blowing. That works to secure the internship in the first place but not so much to convert it into a full time job.
As others have said — do your prep, work very hard and be likeable / normal (don’t be a brown noser or the annoying intern who won’t go away and is overzealous).
I had the same fear as you when I started my full time job because I was one of the few not from Oxbridge, turned out most of them were nothing special at all intellectually, were inept socially as they were overly coddled and lacked any entrepreneurial drive. Safe to say I didn’t have any issues despite initial fears
Removing mog from your vocabulary is a good place to start for improvement
coming from "LBOnlyFans"
You do not need to stress about the other interns being more prepared or smarter than you- all of the interns start off pretty equally retarded and useless. Just gotta have a good attitude, work hard, and take pride in your work.
As an intern, you get pretty menial tasks while you learn the file system and business best practices. It’ll generally ve simple tasks so just don’t eff those up and you’ll be fine.
It's an anonymous forum. Why do you feel the need to say "top" BB?
You made it to the same place as them despite having a relatively weaker background, it means that once you get those hours in you'll probably beat them all easily my king
I've been in banking for nearly 10 years. I've been a staffer for most of those. There is literally zero correlation between where you went to school, what your GPA was, what your parents did, and any other measure of objective "value" and how you perform. The only thing that matters is you try hard(er), have a positive attitude and show a bit of common sense. If you do those things as an intern and analyst, you will be fine. Everyone in this industry thinks so highly of themselves, but the reality is this job is not hard and the only thing that matters is how much you care. It's debatable whether you should care, but that's a topic for another, incredibly long and philosophical post.
Unless you're not smart, but I highly doubt that's the case if you received an offer.
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