IB was the solution to my ADHD problem

I got diagnosed with ADHD a few months after my IB internship. Before that internship, I had struggled to stay focused in my other jobs/internships in other companies and finance roles. I just found it so difficult to focus on stuff that I didn’t care about for long periods of time, like going project accounting or updating automated spreadsheets and reports. In my exit interview with my intern supervisor I was told that I had a lot to work on to improve my office skills, even if the work I did was fine.

Naturally I was worried that I was going to really struggle with the monotony I’d been warned about, and that the sleep deprivation would totally kill my ability to focus. In college I had always worked on a sporadic schedule where I would do short intense sprints before spending longer periods doing anything else. I was nervous that that habit would be incompatible with being an analyst.

IB was totally different to what I expected though, and I ended up thriving more there than I had in any previous internship. Despite the work being “boring”, my VP and analyst intern supervisors were surprisingly encouraging of me taking detours to learn about the companies we were making materials about/for, and I felt like I was getting rewarded for the types of distractions I had been criticized for in previous jobs. No one really cared if I worked with headphones in listening to audiobooks or podcasts. The tasks I was given were short enough that I could bounce from project to project without getting bored. And the only time management thing people cared about was that I was getting my deliverables in quickly.

Now that I’m medicated for ADHD and know that’s what I have, things are definitely easier than they were. But I was still so glad to find that the things that had made it hard for me to do well in other roles were not anywhere near as problematic in IB as they had been in some of my prior internships.

My experience is my own, so I’m not trying to say that ADHD wouldn’t be a problem for anyone else. I guess the reason I’m writing this is because if someone like me ends up reading it, who’s worried about their own ability to keep themselves under control in this type of job, then I can tell them that they might find it easier to deal with than they think.