Freshman Summer Options
What should I do this summer? I'm a freshman at a HYPSM school with a wide variety of interests across both finance and tech. Options:
- summer analyst at a relatively well known hedge fund.
- Intern at a small but well known fintech VC firm
- Software engineering at a medium sized fintech startup
I have different opportunities but broadly these are the three buckets they fall into.
I'd get to grow my computer science skills at the software engineering internship but there's a ton of other ways to do that (personal projects, etc). The VC firm would be interesting but I doubt I'd learn much. I'm leaning towards the hedge fund because, even though I think I'm going to end up in tech, it seems like I'll learn the most there. Thoughts? Thanks!
I wouldn't do VC. You would likely only do very basic filtering work and/or cold calling/emailing founders. Probably not the most scintillating job imo. Hedge fund will probably also be very menial tasks. Highest chance of doing interesting work would probably be in the SWE role.
Really? I thought being a summer analyst would be a good learning role. SWE it is then
Shouldn't just go with my advice. Ask mentors in the industry. Also strongly depends on how interesting investing work is to you. If you don't care about it, you will never like the HF job. I would also consider the provenance of the hedge fund.
a bit off topic, but why do these firms even want OP to work for them over the summer? They pretty much know he won’t be seen again after the summer so what’s the point of even hiring him in the first place? I guess the same goes for the boutique IBs many intern at their sophomore summer
Most are unpaid or the pay sucks so it’s great for the firm and you can make the intern do all the work nobody wants to do.
Do whichever you think will be most interesting. The SWE internship will boost your coding skills but the HF internship will probably teach you how to model. If someone asks you in an IB interview to walk them through a DCF and you've built 3 DCFs during an internship then that's a great spot to be in.
I think I'm going to do the hedge fund internship for that reason. I'm taking a lot of CS classes and building CS projects on the side. HF internship will let me get some more finance/modeling experience
Provident aliquam ut deserunt eum amet vitae voluptates. Soluta sapiente voluptates harum praesentium.
Inventore nihil fugit voluptas consequuntur itaque nihil deleniti et. Doloribus eum iusto earum ex maiores ut. Totam aut dolorem quia dolorem tenetur. Quia quis quaerat quae repellendus animi doloribus amet.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...