Value of an MBA IB Internship for CD

Hi All,

I want to gather opinions on the value of an internship at a boutique investment bank, specifically on whether it will help me transition into corporate development. My background is in consulting and I will be returning back to my previous employer (sponsored) after business school (currently an MBA student). I am interested in moving to corporate development long-term but have been recently told that most groups are composed of ex-bankers. Would an internship in banking look good for my resume when I attempt to switch in the future? Or will most employers just ignore it since it is only an internship and not a full-time position? I will be involved in financial modeling for a few live deals so the internship will allow me to attain deal experience (I have none before). Thank you in advance.

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Best Response

Sorry for not providing more info. This is my only finance-related opportunity at the moment. My question is do you think having this internship on my resume will help me move to corporate development down the line? I'm trying to see whether or not if it's worth doing this internship or should I just do something I enjoy but completely unrelated (e.g., media & entertainment or a startup). From my past experience, most employers did not care about undergraduate internships when trying to switch jobs (internships only matter for straight out of college/campus recruiting hires). They focused on full-time experience. I wasn't sure if this is any different at the MBA level.

I know ideally I should aim for a BB/EB internship and convert it to full-time. However, I want to return to my previous employer (financial reasons) and also do not want to do banking hours for 2-3 years before switching to corporate development (personal reasons).

 
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Sorry for not providing more info. This is my only finance-related opportunity at the moment. My question is do you think having this internship on my resume will help me move to corporate development down the line? I'm trying to see whether or not if it's worth doing this internship or should I just do something I enjoy but completely unrelated (e.g., media & entertainment or a startup). From my past experience, most employers did not care about undergraduate internships when trying to switch jobs (internships only matter for straight out of college/campus recruiting hires). They focused on full-time experience. I wasn't sure if this is any different at the MBA level.

I know ideally I should aim for a BB/EB internship and convert it to full-time. However, I want to return to my previous employer (financial reasons) and also do not want to do banking hours for 2-3 years before switching to corporate development (personal reasons).

Again, I'm probably not the best person to give advice about this, but if you're not going to go into banking/dev post-internship, there's not a lot of value to doing the internship. If you're 100% set of returning to your company, you'll have a lot of FT experience before attempting to convert, and that will be weighed most heavily.

I'm wondering though why you would forego directly recruiting for corp dev/banking out of your MBA program. I'd wager that your best chances of breaking in are right now especially if you did a banking internship or leveraged that offer for a corp dev internship. The sponsorship is going to matter a lot less if you look back in a couple years and find yourself too far down the track to break into CD, so I'd try to capitalize right now when you're best poised to get an offer.

 

Getting a corporate development position right after b-school would be ideal. However, based on what I heard from fellow students/alumni, it is difficult to get a corporate development job (internal M&A) without previous banking experience. I checked out the profiles of students in the M&A department of top companies I'm interested in and they all had some type of banking background (a few had Big 4 TAS/Valuation background). I'm still going to try but it might not be possible.

As far as directly going into i-banking after school, I want to avoid that for personal/family reasons.

 

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