How to land and internship for the summer with no experience and only one year of college
Hello, I am currently a freshman at The Ross School of Business at The University of Michigan. I have dreams and aspirations to do investment banking, the biggest reason I chose to go to Ross. I know its essential to get my foot in the door with an internship and therefore I think it'd be great to have one this summer, but I have no idea where to start as my only job experience is being a lifeguard and valet. I would like to work preferably on the east end of Long Island or possibly the city if I have to. If anyone has any advice on where to look, when to apply, and who to reach out to for a freshman internship that would give me the best advantage in becoming an investment banker one day it would be amazing. Thank you!
Email a bunch of search fund founders. This internship will typically be unpaid and the work you do is pretty simple (just a bunch of sourcing) so they don't care if you have no experience. You can find search funds on searchfunder.com or Axial.
start networking early, reach out to alumni, join relevant clubs or groups, keep your gpa up, take advantage of your schools career center
Cold email every small IB boutique you can find (worked for me)
Also worked for me. Probably emailed 30 firms and 2 responded, one of which gave me an interview and I was later hired.
Long shot cause this is so old, but when you talk about cold emailing, did you just shoot an email to the actual company's email address, or spend time finding people who worked there?
Not the original commenter but:
LinkedIn -> find people who work at IB boutiques in that area -> find email address of the person or general format for the company (just google, plenty of sites that give you this) -> cold email asking for a call or meetup if you're physically near
Do this for other firms too, just cause you want to do IB does not mean your first internship has to be IB (anywhere from family offices to small PE firms to hedge funds, anything remotely finance as market is pretty bad so don't be picky especially with initial opportunities).
Don't email a bunch of people in the same company/group at the same time as you'll be the annoying person that people will talk about. If they don't reply, follow up again in 2 weeks. If no reply still, move on.
Also do a brief research on the person and try to connect on something personal (anything remotely related works from school to hobbies to anything). Makes your email stand out.
Thanks for helping out! First thing I'll have to do is probably figure out a list of small firms of the types you mentioned in my area. Like you said, I'm definitely not only targeting IB at the moment, just trying to get my foot in the door with finance so far.
Nobody expects a freshman to have any experience. I just emailed a ton of boutiques and ended up getting one in PWM. Then I leveraged that for an IB internship, then two PE (SF) internships which all helped me land my big SA for junior summer. I had no experience coming into college. Starting early on helps a lot though as your experience snowballs
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