Intern who sucks at his job

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share a mid-summer review of my experience interning at an UMM/MF so far, and hear some thoughts you all may have about demonstrating improvement - specifically, how to interpret vague feedback, but moreso how to implement. This may be a bit specific (hopefully I’m not the only one though), but I’ve ofttimes found myself taking 5+ hrs, sometimes the whole day on one assignment (I.e. finding comps and precedents, inputting them into the model, and then creating charts) whereas I see analysts who can do this work in under an hr. These kind of mundane tasks have been my main role and while not intellectually difficult, drain the clock for me. The issue here is that I haven’t gotten a ton quicker, which makes me wonder if there is a skill issue or I’m over analyzing when I do these kinds of things due to my caution for detail (I’ve gotten feedback that I need to improve on this). While working on an assignment recently, I’ve had team members come up to me and sarcastically joke about the time it’s taken me to complete x project, and I always respond apologetically. But I’m kind of confused at the moment because I’m typically quick at picking things and been told this, but I also don’t want to sacrifice work quality for speed. Any advice generally from senior people, people who’ve had a situation like this, or clarity on whether I’m overthinking it or am not efficient enough for the point where I’m at in my internship, would be much appreciated.

7 Comments
 

I felt the same during my internship too. The trick is finding the perfect balance between going on autopilot for models while maintaining an attn to detail. Definitely hard starting out since you’re having to digest a ton of complex info relatively quickly to provide analysis on a high level.

I’d recommend setting timers/goals for ~20mins per comp to start to force yourself to work a little faster, worked for me. Good luck

 

This makes sense. How long did it take you to feel relatively up to speed with the analysts that were on the team. End of summer? 3-4 months into the job ft? Thanks

 

I stayed on part-time during the fall semester after the summer, and even then it took around 2 months until I felt somewhat in the same range as the analysts. At the end of the day it is reps, and the FT guys have been doing it for considerably longer so it's expected that there's a learning curve

 

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