college junior seeking advice on accepting internship offer or not

Hey everyone,

I'm currently a junior studying finance at a non target school looking to get into the industry. I was recently given an offer by a buldge bracket firm to work in their corporate center (Back office) for an internship for the summer. I need some advice on whether to accept or not because my goal is to be in investment banking or sales and trading (which im assuming recruiting is over for). Should i accept this position at the buldge bracket and hope to be able to move around in the future (assuming i will get the full time offer)? Or do you guys think that if i accept this internship, I still may have a chance to get into IB or S&T next year when i apply for full time roles, or will banks not look at me becaus ei was in a back office position? Or should i decline the offer and keep looking for other FO oppurtunities.

I could really use the help!

 
Best Response

As a disclaimer, I am also a junior as well. So my advice may not be the best. But from what I hear, it is fairly difficult to move around in a firm due to the sheer number of interns they have aka the current interns take the FT role. So, I would imagine it is even harder to come in from the BO, but not impossible! You could network like crazy and be one of the few :)

As for accepting it not, I would keep looking for FO opps if you can, of course. But I do know that almost all of the BB banks recruit few to none straight for FT senior year.

Hope that helps! Again, I am the same age as you and I do not know 100% haha best of luck and congrats on the offer!

 

This question gets posted a lot here and there seem to be two schools of thought on this question. The first is what I like to call "Gung-ho FO". These are the guys who will tell you to reject this internship, even if it is the only one you have from a non-target school. At that point you'll still need to work so cold-emailing / calling boutique firms for a FO internship would be best. As you know the junior year internship is key to landing a FT role. So the idea is that you'll get great experience this summer that you can either leverage into a FT offer with that firm or a FO offer elsewhere.

The second school of thought, (no I don't have a name for it) but they will tell you to take the internship, network and work your way up from there. This may entail networking internally (company-wide messaging apps work well here, and you do have a database of everyone in the firm) or meetings / lunches you may set up during the course of the summer. If your goal is IBD / S&T (and you should figure out which one you want) then you can network with them and offer to help them with a small project. Knock it out of the park and they may give you a shot, if not a great recommendation.

Personally, I think a lot of your success with either strategy depends on your background as well as location. If you have a 3.5+ GPA, and the internship is in NYC or other such financial hub, I say absolutely take it. The structure of the SA @ a BB is actually very good and will allow you to get a lot of networking done in a short time. With a strong background in one of the best cities for finance you will be set up well. I know people who did IT / Ops SA at a BB and they were able to land FT consulting after graduation. They had the best success with Big 4 and MBB wasn't happening, but still solid roles nonetheless.

 

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