Sophomore summer internship question

I am a sophomore at a target school and am looking to do investment banking, preferably BB after junior year. I have an internship offer this summer and am wondering if it is solid. It's at a business brokerage firm which does M&A advisory for buy-side and sell-side clients that are small and medium-sized business (worth $100,000-$5 million). Some of the work I will be doing includes valuation and due diligence (although I won't really be dealing with financial markets since it's on a smaller scale). To me, it seems like I will be getting a similar experience as I would at a boutique investment bank, just working with smaller clients. Is this a solid internship, or would it be much better to have a boutique investment bank? How hard are is it for sophomores to get boutique internships?

In general, what types of internships are good for sophomores other than of course boutique IB? I've heard PWM is not so great, but why is that?

Also, will it hurt me that this will be my first internship? I do have a high GPA, good entrepreneurship/finance extracurriculars and plan to network a lot.

Any and all help appreciated.

3 Comments
 
Best Response

Not sure why you're getting MS.

If you don't have any outstanding offers from banks, you should take your current offer. In any case, IB internships for sophomores are difficult to get, especially if you're not a woman or minority. Also, it's too late in the cycle to begin looking for anything.

Though your internship isn't particularly outstanding, it's pretty good for a sophomore. It's certainly something you can leverage in the future for an IB internship.

I don't know where you heard that PWM is bad for internships. On the contrary, PWM provides excellent opportunities for freshmen and sophomores.

No, it will not hurt that this is your first internship. Plenty of people have gotten junior year IB internships without having any past experience/internships.

 

To be honest, I feel sophomore internships don't really matter too much if you are already at a target with a good GPA. You'll probably get an interview regardless the following year if you network (which presumably you will have plenty of opportunities to do so at a target). I go to a target with no finance internships and getting interviews was not a problem; I'm sure you will be fine.

With that being said, I would do something you are legitimately interested in, not say, PWM, for the sake of wanting to IBD (I personally don't think it helps much, except maybe getting you a connection into the firm for an IBD interview)

 

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