The paradox of getting an internship
As a sophomore at a target school, I am having a lot of trouble getting an internship over summer break.
My GPA is decent but I think the main thing that is killing me is work experience. I need an internship to get more work experience, but I feel like I am getting rejected from a lot of these jobs because I lack solid work experience. I am involved on campus, but in terms of work experience, I have very little relevant work experience. I've been applying to a lot of finance related jobs, not just ibanking, and I am not hearing back from anyone.
What advice do you guys have for me?
anything finance related honestly, but i would like to work at an investment/Asset Management firm this summer.
I would love to have my resume reviewed, but would rather not have my resume floating around the internet
You want anonymous privacy, yet you have your full name as your username...
cold emailing is going to be your best friend.....that's how i got my IB internship as a sophomore (from a non target by the way)
Same. huge generalization here, but I think a lot of target kids don't know the meaning of the hustle
I've cold emailed a lot of people, most just respond by saying their firms are too small to hire an intern. Do you have specific advice for cold emailing people?
This. I dont want to sound arrogant or anything, but for my first internship it took me around 300 cold emails before getting a first interview. Also, I had done a complete valuation of a public company that I attached to my emails to try and show that I had the basics down. You need to start hustling for real.
So when I was a sophomore, I was always unsure exactly what people did in the summers between their sophomore and junior years. I had the same question: how was I supposed to get work experience without already having work experience?
In retrospect, I've realized that there's no standard answer. People literally do completely random things for their sophomore internships. Here's a list of things that people at my school (a semi-target) did in the year before their junior SA stints in banking: worked at a 3-person, no-name boutique investment bank (myself), interned for a Congressman, interned at a Fintech company in Seattle, interned at the New York City budget office, interned at a lower middle-market PE firm in Charlotte, interned at a no-name hedge fund that doesn't even have a website... the list goes on. Most (if not all) of these internships were unpaid.
The main thing you can do at this stage is cast a wide net. To get my internship at the boutique, I cold-emailed nearly 100 firms. I offered to work for free (although you might not want to say this upfront). Out of those 100 firms, I got 3-4 positive responses, and I took the first job that I was offered.
how did you get their emails? did you just go on their website, and then click contact us? Or did you find MDs, and then try to find their email?
Good lord, if you can't do some googling and LinkedIn stalking (research). How the H are you going to conduct due diligence on a live deal? A high gpa can reflect several things: grade inflation, Red Bull and addy the night before the test, padding your transcripts with easy courses, you're good at following directions from others (can't think for yourself), access to the answers ahead of time. Gpa doesn't equate to instant success, you got to hustle and be hungry or you'll get your lunch eaten in the real world.