Sophomore Internship Choice
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I'll do these in order:
1) The brand name is nice to have, but without good duties to back it up, it'll be hard to take seriously if you're mostly doing HR-stuff. It doesn't sound like much learning will be going on; learning is what you should be focused on right now. 2) This is a solid one! Modeling is always nice to have (management consultants also love Excel), and deal sourcing can be pretty fun. This seems like the most relevant, in terms of skills. 3) While it's nice to work with MBB-people, there's no guarantee they had much pull at their firms (or if they still do). You could always do a different internship and network. Business Development, like administrative stuff, especially at an intern level, is nothing to write home about.
It sounds like the boutique PE one is best, especially if you're not sure about finance -- it will give you more hands-on exposure in the finance world than 1 and 2 will, and the skills will be more easily transferable (of course, this is assuming you do actually make a few models and they're not just saying this to woo you, which can happen). This way, you can see if you like the work and talk to some of your co-workers, a number of whom were probably investment bankers at some point. Plus, as mentioned earlier, you can network with MBB people (who you seem to be much more familiar with) on your own time. Either way, congrats on the offers and best of luck!
Hi dcrowoar, thanks so much for your input first. I have read through a lot of threads here about the soph internship and it seems like most people vote for boutique IB/PE. I understand that the job in PE might be more relevant to IB but my concern is that I am not sure what kind of job I will get. Since the internship in boutique PE is less structured, I am worried if most of time I spend will be on doing the research and data entry. I might be wrong on this but a lot of my friends get PE internship in soph summer and I don't think it is really a good way to distinguish myself in junior year recruiting. However, I didn't meet a lot of people who do mid-office job in their soph years. I am not sure if this is because my school is around a financial hub. What do you think?
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