Incoming SA. I’m decent at theory, but my excel speed is tragic. I still use the mouse for everything. I keep hearing horror stories about interns staying until 4am because they're slow. Is there a drill or tool specifically for speed? I don't want to burn out just because I suck at hotkeys.
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Just practice building full models, and you will slowly get faster. Lot of tutorials out on youtube you can use to get started.
Interns are not touching models
Are you dense? OP is asking for tips on getting faster in Excel and reps in Excel are the only way. Practicing modeling is a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
bump pls wso vet’s drop some wisdom 🙏
Don’t be worries about being “the slow intern”, that is fine. Your speed will improve over time
Be worried about being “the intern that makes mistakes”. Once trust is lost it’s hard to get back
Do any practice model test and don’t touch your mouse the whole time - once you do it 3-4 times you’ll be fast enough
While ur still in college try to use excel on your classwork and use that as an opportunity to get better with excel. Practice one shortcut a day (at least) and you’ll pick it up quick!
A shortcut to this you can take is to unplug your mouse and run excel on keyboard only (I had a former RBC banker do this to me at an internship, it helped me so much even tho it was kinda sucky at first)
If you were on the quarter system you’ll be just fine
Why not just take basic excel courses like WSP and whatever else?
Hurts your brand more to be fast and wrong than slower and correct.
As long as you hit deadlines or communicate ahead of time you’re getting stuck before you miss a deadline you’ll be fine. No brownie points for early work that’s riddled with errors
We all start out slow, so don't panic. But yeah, if you're still clicking through the ribbon to format a cell, you are going to get crushed when live deals hit lol...
If you want a dedicated tool for speed drills, I used Cook’d right before my SA stint. It forces you to build out 3-statement models and LBO schedules. Because you're racing against a clock, it forces you to rely on Alt key sequences and Ctrl + Arrow navigation just to survive the drill. Just spend a couple of hours a week running those sims with your mouse physically unplugged.
Also an incoming analyst, but I can share what worked for me.
As a few people said, building models on your own can really help with your speed. If you have a desktop, unplugging the mouse can actually help a ton to force you to learn navigation and shortcuts, since you can do almost everything w/o a mouse.
Practice will be the best for shortcuts. If you struggle to remember you can either print out a sheet with common ones and practice until you don't need to look, or, when you hit ALT, the keys for each toolbar tab will appear, and after you hit that key, it'll show the keys for everything under that tab. It's fine to need reminders or be slow at first, I definitely was.
But overall, it's all just practice. It might not make perfect, but it'll make habit.
The easiest method is to, as the above says, practice building models BUT, unplug your mouse and every time you go to reach for it, stop, open Google, and search "Excel shortcut for _____", then write it down. If you have any upperclassmen at your school that have done banking internships as well, reach out to them and ask them to just sit down with you for an hour and walk you through all the shortcuts / useful Excel skills that come to their mind. This is what I did, and it's materially easier to have someone that's done an internship just brain dump useful stuff than sit through a 10h course that will teach you a bunch of useless shit like pivot tables.
This is ball knowledge
Why everyone talks about Excel? In my internships I definitely spend more time in PP to prepare slides... Pitch decks, CIM... I never touched a model during my first... simply because it was energy, where models quickly become very unique and complex. Maybe a long list in Excel or similar... Definitely do PP first.
to this point - is there a good way to learn PP? any kind of recommended course? or just trial by error etc?
I think you should search for slidedecks or Infomemos firstly and see what they look like, what graphs and illustrations they use. Then you just go into it and try to rebuild something similar, with shortcuts.
the wall street prep powerpoint course is insanely good, everyone should do it. It’s catered to banking and you’ll be a machine afterwards, can’t recommend it enough
Focus on being correct and delivering high quality work. Speed comes with time and experience. That said, if you are having trouble using excel without a mouse I might recommend buying the excel crash course on Wall Street Prep (think it’s ~$30). I did this before my summer internship years ago and found it helped.
In general, I think social fit, work ethic, and doing a good job on the tasks you are given are the key judgment criteria for SAs.
Imo there’s no such thing as a “slow” intern. You most likely won’t even touch a model or anything important. Expectations are pretty low for work and mainly revolve around your personality and likability. Just do your best, try not o make mistakes, and be fun to work with. The internship is more a test of your character than your actual skills: spoiler alert, no intern really has many skills
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