So I'm four weeks in to my first investment banking internship. First couple of weeks were a real breeze - I was doing lots of relatively simple tasks like slides, research work, updating stuff, etc. Dealt with the hours fine and my deliverables were always pretty good. I earned the trust of the team I was working with pretty quickly and felt like a real analyst, e.g. I would receive mark ups directly from associates and would be trusted to process them, was allowed to do a valuation model going into a pitch book, etc
Now beginning of this week I got staffed on a deal that's in the middle of the prep phase. Initially everything was fine, doing slides, updating boring stuff and doing up simple charts. Past couple of days it has gotten a lot tougher though. I've been asked to do number crunching a lot more complex than I've ever done before (had basically never done data analysis before this).
I can't help but feel like I'm useless and just not good enough for this. My Excel skills aren't exactly shocking - I'm fine doing sumifs, countifs, vlookups, index match etc, but when I'm faced with a spreadsheet with 72 months in it and 300 clients and I need to write if(and formulas for each year to crunch data for a cohort analysis, I really do feel out of my depth... In this example I gave it a shot and it my formula was wrong and the analyst basically had to do it for me. Is this sort of level of data crunching the norm for interns generally?
For anyone who's had experience with interns, what sort of level are they generally at? I really have no idea and can't tell if I just wasn't prepared for this. I'm at a boutique and there wasn't a training program so some aspects (mainly excel data crunching) have been a real steep learning curve.
It's relatively common to feel useless when starting out, especially if you don't have a training program. It's an internship, so not a big deal. Be happy that you're getting to work on stuff so complex that it stumps you.
just the fact that you are asking this to yourself is a good start. the last thing your teammates are gonna worry about are your Excel skills. If you are a quick learner and you feel like the team engages you in deals, that means you are well respected. Talking to many contacts in IBD, most of them described their decision rule of thumb for hiring interns as the "layover rule": would I enjoy spending 14 hours stuck in the airport with this guy? I have been there like you this summer, what I can tell you is that they will appreciate much more if you tell them "I'm not so good at modelling/data crunching, can you please give me some spreadsheets to look at/exercise with?" Next week you will be better and so on. And if you are never gonna be the best in Excel, compensate with something else! Good luck with the rest of your experience!
How complex can your formulas be getting?
My advice to you is take a step back and think through what you're trying to do logically. Lots of time, I find juniors getting mired in the details and missing the big picture
Not that complex at all, but Ive basically never used Excel for anything this complicated. It takes me a while to do thigs the first time and figure it all out myself, but after that I tend to be fine. E.g. When we get updates client data and I need to run similar analysis, Im very quick.
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