What are IB Intern Hours Actually Like????

Starting in IB this summer, and still don't 100% get what the hours are like. I know you should expect to be in the office and always be on call, but when you're actually in the office is there a lot of waiting around, or do you pretty much always have something to do? Again, I know that every group is different, but I was wondering if you're spending a lot of that time just sitting around watching YouTube.

 
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I would expect 9am to 1am Monday- Thursday. Friday 9am-6pm. Saturday and Sunday you might have off completely or a  4pm-1am on Sunday. 

In terms of the work, it depends what deal you are staffed on and how busy your bank is. I would expect that you might have 1 week where you are sitting around doing nothing and another week where you are redacting documents or putting together PowerPoint slides almost the entire day. IB work in general is highly variable and lumpy—weeks and days can be very calm or compete messes. Partially why people say the job sucks is you have no control and no idea when those times are and this makes it very hard to plan anything. In theory at any moment you could be a second away from a complete fire drill—so you can never really relax.

 

Yup this was 100% accurate. Interned at a BB last summer can confirm

 

In terms of weekend work, is that more remote or in office? Just curious as to if I’m meant to know that I should go to the office all day on Sundays for when they need me or if they tell us when they need us there and to get there asap.

 
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Can someone add their experience from bbs/mms/3rd tiers?

 

It’s really not going to change based on “tiers”. It’s a person specific thing. Some offices have better internal controls or culture others have worse ones. Even within a bank, you will have very different intern expectations among teams. Part of the problem with intern hours is interns are all trying to prove they will be good members to the team, so they stay as long as their team stays even if they aren’t doing any work. A know individuals who worked for shops where 2/3am was expected during the week during their internship. I also know analysts who had hard 11pm rules set by the MD’s. 

 

This might be a dumb question but how do you know you're expected to be in the office super late at night? Like if I have nothing to do at 7pm what's preventing me from just dipping and heading home?

 

You’re gonna get shat on your face if your associate comes looking for you at 9 pm about something to fix for a client and you’re not there. Basically even if you have free time you need to just be there

Source- happened to me last summer

 

This is where being in office in business clothes” is retarded to me. Sitting there doing nothing - if I must be in office, at least let me wear gym clothes so I can stretch / do some body weight stuff at my desk

 

This is a good question and is a great example of why banking can be difficult. Most the job isn’t based on results, it is based on optics and people thinking you are trying hard. As the poster above mentioned, if something does come up and someone goes looking for you, they will be livid that you aren’t there because they are there and you should be trying harder than them since they already have a job and you don’t. 

Separately, the work interns do is really for the most part not helpful. By the final few weeks they begin to maybe get helpful, but for the most part interns slow the process down. The reason you are there isn’t to do work, it is a long 10 week interview for the bank to understand whether you are able to do the job at a full time level. If you are checking in at 6pm many view it as showing you don’t want the job that much. Even if you are done with your work for the night, you should be able to learn something about the bank or practice a skill in order to improve yourself. FaceTime sucks and for full time you can care less about it, but for the internship people will judge you for it even if they say they don’t or won’t.

 

Any insight on what MS coverage groups (that do modeling in-house) are like for the SAs?

 

I was at a bank commonly called sweaty on here and did 7am to 1-2am when busy, 9am-11pm when less busy. Earliest I got done was around 7 or 8 with light comments after that. Not sure how accurate that was to full time but it seemed the interns signed off around when our analysts did. The 7am is a little grey since some mornings 7-9 was all zoom calls and others just managing outlook from my bed until something looked exigent.

 

Not OP- but going to be at a coverage group at a BB this summer, what should I mostly focus on learning/prepping before I start in a month

 

You won’t model, you won’t do anything critical thinking related. Interns always think they will do more work than they actually do. 3 things you should practice:

  • Typing—a large part of your job will be note taking
  • Understanding outlook—a large part of your job will be sending invites to people
  • PPT—you will be tasked with moving logos and doing bs slide work. Focus on doing this well. 

The excel work you do do will likely be cleaning files or marking things in trackers, so really easy stuff. Separately, the two biggest intern mistakes:

  • Not being responsive
  • Rushing through work. Focus on getting things right over being fast. It is better to take twice as long and have something have no errors than have errors and do it fast. Every year I used to repeat that to interns and every year they still would have errors and rush. If you complete a deliverable, step away for 15 minutes and come back and re-review it. Also, print things out that you work on. Finally, if you make an error and someone points it out, make doubly sure you re-review everything before showing that deliverable again. Few things make analysts or associates more mad than multiple comment turns for the same deliverable because someone is being sloppy.
 

Pretty sure they are capping intern hours at like 60 at my BB. Its ridiculous, it does them a grave disservice in understanding what the job is actually like and results in some people taking offers who won't be able to handle 80+ hours weeks, which is when the job actually gets hard and you question why your doing it, the first 60 hours or so are a breeze. They should be capping them at 75-80 or so which includes the intern program trainings and activities. I'm pretty sure they are not allowed to work weekends and we need to send staffer an email if they ever work past midnight, its stupid. HR needs to stay in their lane. There's a fine line between experiencing what the job as actually like and having them pull all nighters which is probably unnecessary given the little value most interns provide.

 

My bank is also doing this (UBS). Might just be for my location though.

 

Top MM:

Sunday to Thursday: 10am to 2am on average

Friday: 10am to 6pm

Saturday 12pm - 12am

Total: ~90 hours with +- 15 hours (I worked till 4-6am for a period of 3 back to back weeks (excluding Friday and Saturday) in the middle). Very dependent on the deals I was on and included the slow ramp on and ramp off periods. Full time analysts definitely worked more than this. This was at one of the most sweaty groups on the street.

 

It wasn’t all that bad tbh.

I only ever stayed up if there was real work. Otherwise I would be “logged in” till 12am and then ping my analyst and they would tell me there’s nothing for me to do and that I can go to bed.

I got a real sense of what the work would be like. being capped at 60 hours would never have allowed me to know what the lifestyle entailed. There was an intern in my class who got the return but didn’t take it because she didn’t like the lifestyle - she wouldn’t have been able to know that had she not worked real hours.

As per above, It was also not about the money. Would I have liked being paid hourly + overtime? Sure - wouldn’t have minded the 30-40k pre-tax earnings. Was it a deal breaker? No. The group more than compensates for this FT so the only things I wanted to take away from the internship was whether I liked the work and the whether I was a good fit for the group.

 

Thanks for the data, I’m an incoming SA at MM and just curious , if the above posters mentioned that interns are mostly scrubbing through excel to mark shit up or doing quick comments on slides/ managerial shit like taking notes and organizing outlook meetings … wtf are you doing until 2-4 am? Like what’s keeping you awake that long? I understand you’re staying till your analyst stays but is it also because they just pile up tasks on you? Or was it some genuinely hard tasks ?

Just curious what to expect work wise because I feel like there’s two sides to the story here. People are saying being an intern is easy work as long as you show up, don’t be lazy and do the minimum with no mistakes etc… but at the same time you’re working FT hours which makes it sound like you’re doing FT analyst work.

 

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Thanks for the data, I'm an incoming SA at MM and just curious , if the above posters mentioned that interns are mostly scrubbing through excel to mark shit up or doing quick comments on slides/ managerial shit like taking notes and organizing outlook meetings … wtf are you doing until 2-4 am? Like what's keeping you awake that long? I understand you're staying till your analyst stays but is it also because they just pile up tasks on you? Or was it some genuinely hard tasks ?

Just curious what to expect work wise because I feel like there's two sides to the story here. People are saying being an intern is easy work as long as you show up, don't be lazy and do the minimum with no mistakes etc… but at the same time you're working FT hours which makes it sound like you're doing FT analyst work.

Good question - one I think it varies from bank to bank and the stage the deals you are working on as well as just the sheer no. of deals. The main deal I was staffed on had just gone live, was a relatively big one (1.5-2 bil) and was in the teaser phase as I ramped up in week 2. So that took up a lot of time and energy. By week 3-4 I had taken ownership of all things formatting related on the decks (teaser was the standard 12-15 pages but the MP was 140 pages and involved a lot of turns as we updated numbers, got new info and stuff). It was an asset level deal and we showed a lot of map based info graphics and I had taken ownership of that too - so much so that the seniors would ask me questions instead of the analyst. Whenever new comments would be added I would basically take a stab at everything that I could do.

Another thing to note was also that the analyst I was staffed with on this was also on 2-3 other deals I was on. So when I would be done with this deal’s work I would already have other deals’ work lined up. So even if the work was not anything ground breaking there was always work to be done (all my deals were live). The associate on another deal also gave me more stuff to work on in terms of depth (instead of just logo assigning) including creating different graphs on some pretty detailed analysis we had to do which he made me do. Another time around 1:30am, my analyst told me that we had to create a marketing deck to track responses to one of our deals that had just seen the teaser go out (not the big one) and literally told me to search for a precedent and come up on this 4-5 page deck on my own so I went about that which took some time - but was really meaningful because it was 100% my work product from start to finish.

There were also weeks specially the last two weeks where I was fiddling my thumb so much so that I got put on another deal in the last week just so I had something to do.

So I was doing something between an intern’s work and a FT analyst’s work (the second analyst on the larger deal basically said in his end of summer feedback for me that I completely took over his role which helped him concentrate on other deals). I didn’t touch any models because analysts don’t really touch models until a year in in our group because of the extremely niche nature. The late nights wasn’t because of FaceTime (there was almost none in my group) but instead because there was always something I could do that was needed the next day morning - which is how it’ll be FT.

Re: what you should expect: I would say don’t go in with the mindset of oh I’ll either be assigning logos or modeling ( the two sides so as to speak). Ur mindset should be just to help out the analyst in every way possible with a big smile no matter what time it is. My positive attitude and ability to scale up was what they cited in my reviews and how it separated me from my peers. Realize that this is a 10 week interview for the group to see if you can work as an analyst and you need to power through it. Also, strive as much as you can to see what the actual analysts work like or what they do because working at 60 hours capped (like most of my friends) is very different than working the hours FT analysts usually work. This is interesting because despite my group being a bonafide sweatshop our analyst turnover is much lower than industry averages (specially those groups that cap intern hours because those interns have different expectations when they start FT than what the reality is).

 

It’s easy work but just have to get used to the hours and related stamina. Be ready to be sitting in your cube at 130-2 am with potentially nothing to do….It’s only 10 weeks….firms want to give you a taste as to what to expect I think.

 

thats 100 hours a week as an intern with no bonus lmao i dont care wtf theyre offering me im out of that door so fast. plenty of firms out there not slaughtering their 20 year old college kid interns like that.

 

To each their own but the reality is I now know what the lifestyle actually entails. Others think oh how challenging can 100 hours really be when they start FT and thus they are in for a rude awakening when they actually work for 100 hours instead of the 60 they worked on when they were on 2-3 deals vs. 6 as a FT analyst. It’s very different. My group’s one of the best paying on the street so I know I can make up the money when I start FT. Like i said tho, to each their own.

 

This is one of the more entitled things I've read on this site. Sure, to each their own, but if you can't work 100 hours for "only" base pay for 9 weeks for the promise of longer term much higher earnings, career opps, etc., then you're not being logical. You spent hundreds of hours prepping for IB interviews/networking, thousands of hours in school while paying for the opportunity of longer term benefits, but you can't work for 9 weeks without the immediate gratification of a bonus? Medical interns work 100 hours/week often for way lower pay for years to earn 6 figures eventually. This is a totally reasonable trial run to go through.  

 

Does anyone know about sophomore BB hours (or bofa specifically)? 

 

Even within a bank, you will have very different intern expectations among teams. Part of the problem with intern hours is interns are all trying to prove they will be good members to the team, so they stay as long as their team stays even if they aren't doing any work.

 

Another time around 1:30am, my analyst told me that we had to create a marketing deck to track responses to one of our deals that had just seen the teaser go out (not the big one) and literally told me to search for a precedent and come up on this 4-5 page deck on my own so I went about that which took some time - but was really meaningful because it was 100% my work product from start to finish.

Why the hell are you copying and pasting parts of other comments?
 

You literally copy and pasted my comment and thought no one would find out lol

 

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