Need help deciding if an internship is worth it or not
Hello, I am currently a rising sophomore at Michigan Ross and think that I want to pursue banking. I am also doing a dual degree with computer science and am currently interning as a software engineer at F500 company. I was recently offered a position at Northwestern Mutual for this fall as a Financial Advisory Intern, I am well aware that just because the role has finance in it, it does not mean that it heavily correlated to investment banking. So my question is, what is the best course of action here? Do I take this internship and hope it helps me get interviews, or do I not take it on focus fully on recruiting for IB and GPA ( recruiting for tech as well). My GPA is also on the low end as the math classes here are relatively hard, its about a 3.65 right now (however I have already finished all the cs weeder classes and am well into the degree and it should go up). Thanks in advance for any help. I am in an investment club as well if that is relevant, however it is not one of the top ones and I am planning to apply to them again once the school year starts.
I can confirm on behalf of the entire WSO community that this is NOT an internship you want on your resume…
Is this really true? Can you please elaborate, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Definite, strong no. NWM is a net negative on your resume
That said, try to lock down a finance internship fairly early for soph summer. People will question your dedication to banking with CS major/SWE summer. Try and put as much finance on your resume as possible (ok to have 2 separate resumes for IB and CS recruiting), NWM is not what you want but don't take another SWE internship next summer if you want banking
Thank you for the advice, yes I do have two resumes, my cs one is significantly better(internship, part of the best clubs, good projects,etc), but my business one is not bad. I was planning on trying for big 4 instead of a finance for soph summer(locked down by end of first semester), is this a bad idea?
I would try to decide if you want to do CS or IB, recruiting for either is going to take up a huge amount of your time and you basically can't do both well
What division of big 4? If consulting or accounting, I would skip it unless you really don't think you'll get much else. Just invites even more questions as to why IB and makes it seem like you don't know what you want, since you already have one internship in a different field. You're at Ross, you can likely land a boutique IB, small PE... even PWM would be a more straightforward story.
You are definitely correct in that I do not know what I want, but I do know that CS is a clear backup plan. I took this internship because it paid the most by far (probably a bad idea in hindsight). If I land a good boutique, PE, anything that means a career in finance, a banking job, etc, that is the path that I will go in and focus on. If I cannot get one of those by the end of first semester, I will probably just focus on CS. Also I don't think recruiting for tech should be that time consuming, if I had to guess, I will land Amazon and some other Big N companies with relative ease. But I really do appreciate the advice about the finance internship, I am somewhat clueless in that regard and any direction is much needed.
Northwestern Mutual is literally a meme. You take that offer, you'll be the laughingstock of both friends and any HR rep who happens upon your resume. No joke, I wouldn't touch them with a 20 foot pole. One of my sorry audit friends said that he saw within NWM's financial statements that they pay annual fees to Vault in order to maintain first place rankings atop their "best 100 internship programs list." 🤣
Please remember to circle back again to WSO once you receive an offer from Normura.
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