Just got my first internship in M&A

Repetitiveness and failure mainly. I tried to improve every time, took notes on the technical questions and the mistakes I made.

But here are some guidelines

• being concise and mechanical in my answers.

• learning the basic questions : 3 financial statements and everything that’s on them, how they interact with each other, EV, valuation (DCF, comps, transactions).

• taking the job description, looking at the tasks and relating each of them to a skill or an experience I had. For example, during my bachelor I made weekly presentations on ppt and when working in consulting I was preparing presentations for the clients etc.

• telling them “I want to work for you, I want to join the team, I am motivated”

• speaking confidently

• if I make a mistake or a misjudgment, accepting it and saying something “nice I hadn’t thought about it, thank you”

• being friendly and easy going

• Calling them by their name before they present themselves (pretty obvious but it shows that you care)

• being honest with yourself: if after 10/15 minutes you feel you made too many mistakes to be considered a good candidate, switch to the classroom mode, asking as much “dumb” questions as possible because you missed your opportunity, it should at least help you improve for next time

• being able to express the rationale and the actual deal of 2/3 deals the firm worked on

• when you are done with your answer, just shut up and smile

There might be many other, I will try to add them when I think about them. Time to pay back hahah.

Also, if other people think about more stuff, feel free to comment.