Questions from a sophomore student
Hello everyone,
I have some questions (or worries) in mind that I want to get it out as it has been bothering me for quite a long time.
I just wanted to know how often do people get their junior summer internship in IBD, research, or risk management, without any finance experience before?
What I really want to do is equity research, and I have no summer internship lining up this summer. I did not do anything last summer either. I have held several part time jobs that are not related to finance in any sense (library, part time clerk in high school). However I am working for a n econ professor on her research project as a research assistant. The project itself is not related to finance and the only technical thing I learned is STATA (a statistical program primarily for academic research).
How much does this academic research experience help in the job search process?
Call up a PWM branch office and do a little work for free this summer
agree, no way of telling what the recruiting atmosphere will be like in a year, but it is worth just getting something down on your resume. assuming the rest of your resume is decent, part time PWM will be almost indistinguishable from full time pwm and should be ok as long as you can properly explain how it leads to ibd. you could also get a fall internship to help pad your resume if it is looking sparse
It definitely is possible to get a finance internship junior year without any prior finance experience (and this will be especially so next year given that very few sophomores will have internships this summer). That said, getting a finance internship your junior year will be substantially easier with finance experience this year. My experience was that everyone who had finance experience on their resume from sophomore year got a lot of interviews during the junior year internship interview process, while people without finance experience still got some interviews, but had less success. That said, even if you aren't doing finance, it is important to do something that you can spin as being related to finance/ preparing you for finance that you can talk about in your interview (the research project for your professor involving STATA is an excellent example of this [I actually had done something similar for a professor and talked about it extensively in my interview]). Check out this (http://www.gottamentor.com/viewAdvice.aspx?a=336) and this (http://www.gottamentor.com/viewAdvice.aspx?a=342) for more advice about where to look for jobs in non-traditional areas that you can spin as related to finance as well as advice about pursuing a PWM internship. Good luck!
In the link below, you will find a "Day in the Life" piece detailing the activities of a research analyst:
http://gottamentor.com/viewAdvice.aspx?a=37
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