8 Comments
 

Still, you work 12-13h per day as an intern in the M&A/Capital Markets department of a top bank. You'd expect to do some modelling in that time?

Although, you can always learn some basic modelling on your own and pretend that you learned it during the internship - or, just learn some modelling on your own and admit you learned it on your own (shouldn't matter where/how you learned it).

Having said that, I'm still a student so don't take my opinion as a fact.

 
Best Response

Talk to your manager and voice your concerns (diplomatically, of course). Ask him if there's anything on the group's docket (research, post-deal analysis, etc) that you can work on.

Folks are often so busy working on their deliverables that it's not uncommon for interns to fly under the radar. We had a similar situation with one of our interns, but he took the initiative and asked around for work, and we were more than glad to dump some stuff on him.

I will say that you shouldn't get your hopes up on the type of work you'll do. I've never heard of interns building models before (but then again I work on the quant side).

 

Step 1) Figure out how to spin what you've done impressively on your resume. If you were tangentially involved in a deal go ahead and research everything you can about that deal. Then speak to it as if you were very involved on your resume. Step 2) Start reaching out through your alumni database to 1-2 people in IB at every single BB/MM/boutique bank you can think of. Come up with an elevator pitch about how your current internship has been a great experience but you think bank X would be better for some reason. Be able to intelligently discuss the deals you put on your resume during informational interviews Step 3) Follow up with contacts and make sure your resume is getting to HR at all these banks. You should get a few superdays. Crush them.

 

In my experiences this is pretty common. People get so busy in their routines and on their projects that they forget about the intern or don't have time to think of things for he or she to do. You are in a tricky spot of having to tightrope the line between asking people for work and not annoying them. Go about it strategically and good luck.

 

Even though there are no deals, they are constantly on calls with clients or other work related calls... ask your managers to join the calls and listen to what they say...

Also, try to improve the current models... for example,

Say you use CapIQ and the model pulls info on EBITDA... instead of getting this value directly from CapIQ, try to calculate this value by extracting the equation factors themselves from CapIQ and calculating EBITDA... sometimes CapIQ doesn't have EBITDA and this is a way to get around it if you need EBITDA (I think financial companies don't report EBITDA)...

you can do stuff like that if there are no deals going on...

Also, try to go through the valuations and the PP slides of those deals that were near the finish line when you arrived. Try to learn as much as you can and just put them on your resume as if you worked on them. Your MD won't know about it...

 
WallStreetStandard

Even though there are no deals, they are constantly on calls with clients or other work related calls... ask your managers to join the calls and listen to what they say...

Also, try to improve the current models... for example,

Say you use CapIQ and the model pulls info on EBITDA... instead of getting this value directly from CapIQ, try to calculate this value by extracting the equation factors themselves from CapIQ and calculating EBITDA... sometimes CapIQ doesn't have EBITDA and this is a way to get around it if you need EBITDA (I think financial companies don't report EBITDA)...

you can do stuff like that if there are no deals going on...

Also, try to go through the valuations and the PP slides of those deals that were near the finish line when you arrived. Try to learn as much as you can and just put them on your resume as if you worked on them. Your MD won't know about it...

Cap IQ does some weird shit with EBITDA calculations. Definitely necessary to clean adjusted EBITDA yourself.
 

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