Do you think that reading as much valuation and accounting literature as possible or spending as much time as possible honing modelling skills would be more beneficial heading into a summer internship?
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Brushing up on Excel + Powerpoint skills would be more helpful given that a majority of your work will be using those applications. Efficiency and minimizing mistakes are two stand-out traits for interns, and while the latter is hard to avoid during the first couple of weeks, being more efficient than your peers is something you can achieve by being more adept at Excel and Powerpoint. You'll receive a crash course on valuation anyways during your one week of training.
Thanks for the reply I appreciate it. What are some basic tasks I should aim to be efficient in performing?
Shortcuts and Graph/Chart creation and manipulation
Both. However, I would suggest only rereading accounting/valuation books for concepts you do not understand. What worked best for me was performing the actual modeling; cracking open 10K's, firing up the excel and building the model.
Some grasp the concepts only from reading, but for me, working through the model reinforced the topics taught in the books.
When you were building your first couple models would you input the financial statements manually or pull them from Bloomberg or Eikon? A huge bottle neck for me right now is cleaning up financial statements after I pull them from Bloomberg. I feel like I understand the rest of the model relatively well but can’t get establish a good foundation in my financial statements.
How much time should I put in before my summer internship? I have 3 months.
I don't have the luxury of BBG, FactSet or CapIQ right now, although that those tools would be immensely helpful. I download the excel files of the 10K's for the company I am modeling out. Usually their IS includes financials for the past 3 years and BS the last 2, however you can open the prior years 10K and fill the gap should you want consistency in having 3 historic years of IS and BS.
Spend the next 2 months diving into modeling and working through the financials. It'd be nice to have a lot of it down by the time you start, but even having half of it would still be impressive to those you will be working with (assuming you're a Jr Summer Analyst). The last month you can revisit your work, but honestly, just try to relax and have some down time for yourself so you can start your internship fresh.
Always willing to talk via PM if you need any more guidance. Godspeed.
(Whoops, forgot to reply to your comment instead of the thread.)
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