Intro and 1st Internship Question
Hey guys how's it going? First off, I'd like to say thank you to the whole WSO community. I've gained a great deal of knowledge surfing around the site since August and just recently registered last week. A little background about myself: Got recruited to play lacrosse at a complete non-target school and made a big mistake. Realizing this, I'll be studying the spring semester at a community college back home and then transfer to more of a target school next fall. Everything academics wise is good. 4.0 GPA, good EC's, varsity sport etc.
My main question is similar to DJBanker's thread about "walk-ins"
I was eating lunch today at this little shopping plaza 2 minutes from my house and I saw this hidden side door with a sign that had to be for an IB boutique. When I got home I googled the name and sure enough it was. I live in a little NYC suburban town and I never would have thought that a boutique would be located so close to my house. So here's the question: I'll be home at the end of December studying at my community college until I go off to real college next fall. My goal is to walk in, talk to the person in charge of hiring, and if everything goes as planned, legit just be the bitch of this boutique. I honestly don't care if I have to mop the floor, clean windows, get everyone coffee, etc. I just want to see what it's like on the inside so bad. Again, I'm 19 years old, have basically no previous financial experience, and I don't really have anything relevant to put on a resume/know how anything works in a bank.
Basically I would love to know if I should just walk in there dressed for the job and chat it up with whoever is at the front desk about an internship? I feel like this will leave more of an impression than just cold calling or sending an email. I tried searching around the site but couldn't find anything really relevant to my situation. Thank you in advance for the help, I look forward to be a contributing member of the WSO community in the future!
Since you'll be home from December until next fall, I think you should take a month or two to learn some accounting, practice basic financial modeling, and a good grasp of basic finance principles. There are resources online for this, some free and some paid (like BIWS).
Being a boutique, I would imagine that they won't have much, if any, time to show you the ropes of banking. If you walk in there in a couple months though to ask for an (unpaid) internship and demonstrate your drive by saying that you know your financial statements, can put together a simplex DCF, and are genuinely interested in learning about banking, I think you would have a pretty strong value proposition for a 19 year old. They probably are not going to throw you onto any live deals, but if they're short staffed, I think any shop would love to have some free, competent labor working on initial pitch booking.
Basically, given the wide window of time that you have to work with, I think that if you take some initiative and put in some hard work upfront, you'll be a lot more likely to land some sort of gig with them. And if they give you a position, you'll get a lot more out of the experience since you're not going in there completely green. Good luck.
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