Not Learning Much During Sophomore Summer Internship

Hello all, 

Rising Junior here from an LAC fortunate to have signed an EB offer for 2025 with research/start-up internship experiences. At this time, I am doing an internship at a regional boutique investment bank, which I am mostly doing research and non-technical works. I am enjoying the very chill work environment with low expectations for interns. However, I am worried that I may not be well-prepped enough for the next year's internship after realizing all the 2024 SAs come from target business schools with seemingly very strong internship experiences in finance. Though I will be using WSP and other resources to prep for the Junior internship, I am a bit concerned that I may not be competent enough for the next year's internship and potentially not receive a return offer (the firm historically had near 100% return offer rate). Would really appreciate any thoughts on this matter. Is the Sophomore internship supposed to be like this where you are mostly doing works like conducting market research, building CIMs, finding potential buyers, etc., without any modeling/finance works? Thanks. 

7 Comments
 

Majority of interns who do have "internships" prior to junior year are probably not doing any intense modeling. Depending on the bank, it is unlikely that you will even do any live modeling during your internship next year. Do WSP and brush up on PowerPoint/excel shortcuts and you will be fine. Further, building CIMs and other boring work is a much larger portion of IB then people think. Unfortunately, the majority of your day as an analyst will likely not be spent developing groundbreaking merger models for transactions that will shake up the world economy. You are on the right track and getting good experience, I would not stress about it too much.

 

Thanks for the response! I guess I was a bit worried about not having 5+ finance internships like the 24 SAs. Hope I am not too behind and WSP can prep me well for next year. 

 

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