Should I apply for internships or new analyst roles?

Hi,
I'm a final year masters student at a top business school in the UK. I'm applying for sales and trading to all the banks. So my question is should I apply for internships or analyst roles. Most of the graduate positions are filled by interns at the big banks anyway, but then on some of the websites they say that internships are for penultimate year students, which I'm not. I have been advised by my careers office to apply for internships. My ultimate goal is to be working full time at a bank by september which is when I graduate.

2 Comments
 
Best Response

If you are a final year student and you do an internship (a summer one) any return offer you may get will be for the following year, so you will have a year off. Some banks (if not most, or all) will not consider you for an internship if they see you are a final year student, they are indeed intended for penultimate year students. It might be a different story if you are talking about an internship during the school year. If you think you have the experience/credentials to be competitive for a full-time position, apply for those- if not, try an internship. Depending on the recruiting timeline where you are (where I live FT recruits in March-April and internships in July) it may hypothetically be possible to apply for FT and reapply for internships if you get nothing, but I'm not sure how banks view that.

 

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