Now this questions really depends on personality and preference. So far I would have to say mine is recruitment..... strange I know. While I have met many amazing people, and actually hired a few through Wall Street Oasis, you also have to deal with a LOT of bull sh*tters.
More than I was expecting.....
Definitely has given me a fresh outlook on the process from behind the scenes but out of things that I will choose to do in the future, it will be at the bottom of my list.
What about you?
| +413 | Evercore Intern Seizure | 63 | 2h |
| +127 | UBS IB Americas has failed, now behind Santander and Stiffel | 34 | 8h |
| +92 | Sent my Claude prompt to 200+ Teams chat. MD wants to see me Monday. | 32 | 1h |
| +79 | deleted deleted deleted deleted deleted | 44 | 12h |
| +60 | How do I understand vs. just memorizing? | 11 | 22h |
| +54 | Some banks are overrated as fuck | 16 | 6h |
| +49 | The good and bad with Wells Fargo | 16 | 1h |
| +48 | Associate & Above IB exits | 18 | 1d |
| +41 | Tech to IB Pivot | 22 | 2h |
| +36 | Incoming IB Analyst: Best Ways to Prepare? | 13 | 20h |
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a company sent the search fund that i intern for its balance sheet as a pdf. we wanted it in excel. i typed 40 months x 150 line items per month = like 6000 numbers into this spreadsheet
Yeah, when I did accounting people would always request their aging reports in excel and my system generated it in a pdf so I used random pdf to excel sites. Would never be able to type all of that out hahaha
During my summer internship there was a bring your child to work day. That morning, the admin lady who was in charge of it had some kind of emergency and ended up not being able to come in until late.
MD emails "its ok. intern will handle kids"
i can fill in the blanks from there hahaha. hopefully they didn't burn the place down
At least they probably needed less handholding and threw fewer tantrums than some of the clients I've had to deal with
One of my bosses dumped a massive raw-data churn analysis on me late one night. 3,800 rows composed of a mix of yearly/monthly subscription data that needed to be smoothed and converted completely to monthly (so for example a yearly payment had to be divided by 12 and spread out the next 11 months). Ended up working 38 hours straight as a result... worst experience I've ever had
going thru a list of 10000+ companies and figure out which ones were in our target industries.
I was working on the construction of a power center as an intern with the general contractor the summer after my freshman year of college. The TPO roof had just been set, and I was tasked with managing/working with the temp labor guys to repeatedly hose down and sweep the roof for 3-4 days straight. It was over 100 degrees in August and I probably lost 10 lbs that week handing a push broom all day.
Another day on a different project I had to carry up 40-50 different fire extinguishers weighing 30 lbs apiece to various columns in a 4 story parking garage. I would take two at a time one in each hand and travel up the temporary stair case until I was done. It was worse than a two-a-day football practice
had to scan and organize 1.5 years worth of reconciliations during the first week of my accounting internship, and the scanner was messed up so I could only scan like 25 pages at a time. i had only gotten through 4 months after a week of straight scanning before I received other assignments and was able to pass it on to someone else
yeah at my last company when we got audited i had to go in "the closet" which is our giant room of thousands of records to sort whatever the guy requested. it was super annoying and took days
When I was an associate, we had a client (CEO of a midsize company in Mexico) who was coming up to our office in NYC for a couple days every week, for months on end, as part of a sale process. Since his visits were so regular, his wife & kids had gotten used to him bringing back certain things from every trip, including a specific batch of cupcake from a fancy bakery near our office. So every time he visited, we'd finish up the management presentations and he'd ask me to go get him a box of cupcakesfrom this place. And I could've passed that task down to an analyst, but we were doing such a shitty job of getting his company sold that I felt like personally delivering the cupcakes to him was the only thing I was accomplishing all week.
A couple years out of college, the firm I worked for was a lot smaller and there was a lot of interaction between the partners and people at all levels. Myself and another girl were the juniors on the desk, and the head partner came up to us one day. He was a totally cool guy, and I very much looked up to him then, and even more so now.
I think it was around Valentine's day, and he asked my female colleauge if she could do a favor for him by going to a specific jewelry store and pick out a pair of earrings for his wife. He just said that he had very bad judgment when it came to jewelry and was trying to a new route.
My colleague was happy to do it, and the partner gave her his credit card .. with the only instructions being earrings and to "keep it under 15."
Next week the partner comes by and is like verbally high-fiving my colleague because his wife absolutely loved the earrings.. He thanked her profusely for her help.
Then abotu 3 weeks later, he comes back by our area -- this time more discretely.. and says to my colleague "hey, did you know how much you spent on those earrings? My statement says you spent $14,899" ... My colleague was like "yeah, under 15, that's what you said"
He meant $1,500 ...
Fortunately like I said this guy is totally cool so he ended up laughing off the miscommunication and bought us lunch.
good thing that money didn't matter to him too much lol bc thats a big ass difference
Who says 15 meaning $1500? Glad he was cool about it though. Your friend made the right call.
To flip this post premise, now as a manager I NEVER ask my co-workers to do tasks that are mind-numbing or beneath them.
I hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines to do things like web-scraping, email lookups, etc.
And I pay for this myself, out of pocket.
The work still has to get done, but I'd rather give the job to a person in the Philippines for $6/hr (a good wage for there, I'm told) rather than burden my colleagues who are living in a more expensive geography, and who would be annoyed at such work ... just like I was, back in the day.
You have too much empathy. I hope I dont grow up to be you. If I do, I would never pay out of my pocket.
well we'll see.
you're just a student. You don't know the first thing about leading in the workforce. Check back in in a decade or so and tell me how you've gotten on.
Also you'll find that there's plenty of out of pocket expenses once you're in the workforce. $6/hr is a bargain to buy one's time back, and companies don't reimburse for VAs.
And keeping one's subordinates working on higher-value work, and more-interesting / rewarding work is also important.
To carry out your statement to its logical conclusion you're basically saying "no man, you should give your subordinates low-value, mundane tasks or do them yourself."
Does not make sense at all to do so.
Audit at Big 4.
Two things come to mind:
Glorified data entry project which required going through binders of reviewed/highlighted legal documents and inputting information from them in an Access database. Normally this wouldn't be too bad (just boring), however the way in which we had to enter the data varied drastically depending on the type of document and information. You really had to pay close attention and be focused on the details, so you couldn't just zone out and watch stuff on Netflix on your other monitor the whole time. It was horribly tedious and stupid but detail oriented enough such that you still had to use your brain a lot. Me and someone else were eventually removed from the project because we were too slow and weren't going quickly enough.
Was in a role that wasn't a great fit for me and had something dumped on me after a colleague left. We were supposed to assemble a bunch of Excel files and clean them with a SAS program by the following day. As I went through it I realized that it was an absolute nightmare and none of the underlying data was cleaned. Eventually it was 10pm and I was nowhere close to getting it finished, my manager called me and said "OK, I'm on my way back to the office." At that point I knew that I wasn't sleeping that night and the next 3 weeks absolutely sucked; pulled several all nighters (coming to that realization at 10pm and knowing that I'm not going to see my bed for another 24 hours is just awful beyond words). I'm amazed that I didn't quite right there because I knew that the job was not for me and I didn't care at all about the outcome of my work. Thankfully all of my responsibilities were transferred to more competent programmers over the next few weeks.