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.
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.
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
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:
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:
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.
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.
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).