Is my 7am-1am intern schedule normal?? How do ppl do this
Figured out I was in the most intense group pretty damn quickly (staffed on deals during orientation week). Genuinely curious if working 18 hours a day is normal. Barely get time to eat… well… honestly, nobody gets lunch they just order stuff and eat at the desk for dinner. I’m still super stoked for the role and love the work but how tf do ppl do this for extended periods of time? The adrenaline keeps me up but sometimes I feel delirious and feel skin get oily hair getting weak if that even makes sense. No time to work out and obviously sticking to 4 hours of sleep due to stressing and keeping my laptop next to me at night. Apparently other interns r averaging 5 hours of sleep. Now that I’m living in it I’m like is it worth…. Once again I love the work and Can blabber on about finance/model/build decks all day but I feel weak
I know I’ve seen bad stories of “sweatshop hours” here before but now I’m in it. Still having trouble understanding how this is possible. Apparently we work Sunday too
Welcome to IB. Guess we’ll be seeing a ton more posts like this.
They’re really starting interns at 7, assuming your not in a markets role?
Not every group… ofc HR said some bs “get here 9am” and I think when the vp hired me he said 9am start but many analysts, vps, some md get to the office 8 and I have things to be sent out before then so pretty clear they want interns 7:30 and I come 30 mins early to be prepared. Analyst told me interns cutting it close getting in 8-9 range last year didn’t het returns
Damn that sucks, tell us what bank so we can all avoid it
:( hang in there
its not abnormal, but when you're a couple months into a heavy summer internship, it feels particularly intense. Tbh I think what you're feeling is good at this stage, because that means you care! And caring is important and lowkey a lot of effort, so maybe your 18 h days isn't 18h of heavy work but like 10 h of work and 8 h panicking if you did the work correctly.
Time will go by and you start seeing patterns in the models / decks you build, and the thesis you're trying to prove out is less daunting so you get quicker at doing it. keep an eye out for when the associate/ analyst you're working for logs out, and then you can sneak in some groceries, gym etc. Find friends in the job - honestly those are more important than anything, cause they'll keep you sane, give good perspective on how bad is bad.
Also, I think a key developmental arch in banking is understanding when you should and shouldn't dedicate that level of care. That's where you really start cutting down those 18h but still maintain good outputs, and then WLB becomes manageable. Not good by any means but manageable.
(also totally fair that its none of these above and you like a job with more of a balance. that's what the internship is for. hang in there)
What value is an intern providing at 7am and 1am consistently?
I barely trust first years about to become second years to build a model or page on their own and often just do it myself to get it done asap.
An intern? Lol
They barely provide value. Why have them work those hours when I'm just going to have to redo most of it.....
At my bank we have a HR-mandated hard stop of 12am for interns and it's next to impossible to get them to go home by then... not that they are working on anything, but put 20 over-eager, type A, highly competitive people in this type of environment and it basically becomes an hours contest. It's a challenge to prevent/stop this every year. My bet is the fhe full-times don't have these guys grinding away from 7am-1am, it's more that the interns are all afraid to be the last to arrive or first to leave and end up pulling ridiculous hours doing a lot of idle facetime.
It also takes them forever to do work given the high learning curve, so I'm sure a lot of them feel overwhelmed with the speed, accuracy, and detail level that's expected and work even longer hours because of it
Im definitely not providing value 18 hours a day. Nobody is. This whole industry is extremely inefficient.
Bruh how do y’all have this much going on when Fees are down from a down year
How come a few weeks ago you were posting about a PE internship and now you’re at some bizarre elite sweatshop drowning in live deals when all activity is muted?
And what assignments can you possibly being given? They are trusting a teenager or young twenty year old with client facing work?
You expect us to believe you moved from PE to banking and are so god level at interning, your team is giving you 17+ hours of work 6 days a week and it must be done? Our interns shadow the first few weeks and don’t do anything.